The Ag Sales Professional 3.0

What will the successful Ag Sales Professional look like in the year 2030?

 Originally published in Wisconsin Agribusiness Magazine  

Faster—Smarter—Better

We love the future! 

We flock to movies about the future.  Books on the future fly off the shelves.  And I’m sure there are still a steady stream of clients who pay people to predict their future by reading palms or cards. 

In the business world, we are enthralled with the future as well.  We make predictions on how we will operate in thirty, forty or fifty years.  Usually these predictions involve less people doing more with some form of extremely advanced technology.  There are self-driving cars, hover boards and compact tools which make life much easier and faster.

In agribusiness, it usually involves less labor, bigger data and satellite/drone usage wrapped up in a new computer platform.  Walking through the Ag Info Conference last year, you could see many of the advancements coming our way.  There were computer platforms for farm financial management, for grain marketing management and of course for agronomy/crop production. 

Seeing all this, made me wonder how a salesperson will function in this changing agribusiness economy.  I’m calling our salesperson from the future, “Salesperson 3.0”.  In 2030, what role will Salesperson 3.0 play in crop and livestock production?  How does an agribusiness prepare?  More specifically, how does a sales manager lead their sales team through the eventual change? How far out should they try to predict and plan for serving their marketplace? 

Why 10 years?

            The reason for a ten-year range is due to how long it takes to adapt your sales team and business structure to a changing environment.  In agribusiness, we have buildings, processing plants, elevators, rolling stock and an entire set of people dedicated and moving in one direction.  Hopefully, that direction is focused on serving a viable paying customer.  While Rome could have been built in a day, it might not have looked as nice nor stood for 1000 years.  Same goes for your agribusiness.  From start to finish, it could take 3-5 years minimum to go from concept to a brand-new feed mill, grain elevator, Ag retail location or a new truck fleet.  Ten years is probably more likely as we try to limp along with the old equipment for as long as we can.  We could stick one of those bumper stickers on our old fertilizer mixer, “At least it’s paid for!”  While we are enjoying the cash cow stage of our facilities and even our sales team, the market is evolving from underneath us.  Until, we are forced to change. 

            The second reason we need to look at ten years down the road is the length of time it takes to adapt a sales team.  With ten or twenty salespeople on your team, you have more systems, processes and culture involved than you may realize.  You have compensation plans, territory structures, selling styles, internal and external hardware and software for serving customers, and support teams behind those salespeople.  You have salespeople in early, mid and late career.  Wanted or not, your current team has a culture and a brand.  Your culture is what you and they have created.  Your brand is what your culture created in the mind of your customer.  These two factors need to be considered when making the change to Salesperson 3.0.  Unless it’s clearly needed, companies that change culture and brand too fast tend to stumble in their execution in the marketplace.  Farmers become confused, take their business elsewhere and force you to reconsider your changes.

Making a change not only takes time but potentially new salespeople.  I see this directly related to how fast a salesperson is willing to change.  I say willing because it’s their choice.  If a salesperson is reluctant to change and wants to hold onto the past, they better hope the past remains profitable.  Otherwise, progress will run them over and it has no conscience.  If you don’t believe me, look out the window on your next Uber ride, and look at the taxi’s waiting for riders.    

Salesperson 3.0

Faster: 

• Faster product life cycles
• Faster Go-to-Market strategies
• The DIY, Gig economy

Our Salesperson 3.0 will be faster because the world is faster.  Gone is much of the reliance on brick & mortar, steel plate print design, hard copy prototypes, large scale production requirements.  The internet and digital technology allow us to create and produce right from our laptop.  Not everything, but enough that it has changed the speed of business.

We no longer need to build an all-inclusive facility to get product designed and a prototype produced.  Small businesses have sprouted up in every industry to do contract work.  Uber and Airbnb have ushered in the gig economy.  In packaging, the printed bags used to require the time and expense of making steal plates at a high cost.  Making changes required the expense of creating new plates.  Today, bag images are digital, easy to make changes and print on demand. 

If your product or service is based on any form of a computer program, the speed of change for your products just picked up the pace.  The minute you become trained on it, get your mind set on the fact that a version 3.0 is on its way in 6-12 months.  You need to run with and sell what you have, but be ready for the upgrade.  The upgrades are not because the techies are “geeking” out and want to add bells and whistles.  The upgrades allow you to better serve your customer, remain ahead of competition and ward off hackers.  Those three endeavors are endless for computer programs.

Smarter:

• Smarter consumers and buyers of your products
• Smarter technology
• A more connected world

Again, we run into the internet which allows our farmer and our distributor to be smarter buyers.  By distributor, I am referring to your dealer, ag retailer or other distribution channel, which you sell through.  If you sell direct to the farmer/producer, then disregard.  Your customer, no longer needs a salesperson to come along and educate them on the basics of your products.  They already read it on your website.  Then went to Yelp or Twitter to see what your customers said.  They now need a salesperson to be an educated and trusted advisor on your products.  Salesperson 3.0 will spend less time on selling product and more time on the effective application of their products on this specific farm.

Another area that Salesperson 3.0 needs to be smarter in is how their products and services fit into the entire picture for the customer.  As farmers get smarter and use more complex systems, they are using systems that are not stand alone.  Raw data is coming in from multiple sensors and formats from equipment, satellite programs and vendors.  Unless you sell every crop input and program needed to grow a crop, your products are only a part of the farmer’s entire management system.  Salesperson 3.0 will have to understand how their products function along side other vendor’s products.  

Better: 

• Bringing all your resources to bare
• Collaborative
• A Big Thinker on Small Execution
• Faster & Better adoption of change

Our Salesperson 3.0 needs to be better.  This begs the question, “Better than what?”  The answer is “better than before”.  If you have been in sales for a long time, you will understand this by thinking back to your first years on territory.  Mine were in the 90’s: pre-cell phone, pre-internet, which means pre-email!  Wow, talk about the good old days!  I won’t bore you with stories about how hard life was when we had to know where pay phones were and remember our calling card number.  Or how we had to navigate our territory without GPS. 

I will tell you that the salesperson I was in the beginning of my selling career would not survive in today’s market.  Watching the NFL top 100 this year, reminded me of this.  Growing up in the 70’s and watching the great players from the Steelers and the Cowboys, it’s nostalgic to watch the old videos.  However, the speed and complexity of the game would make most of those players outdated for the field today.  We are no different.  We have to be better to remain relevant in our customer’s eyes. 

       How to be better?

• Quit the lone ranger game and bring all your resources to bare: You have great internal resources on your team:  operations, trucking, management, and even accounting.  Bring them to your customer.  Salesperson 3.0 will understand for this to happen, they will have to lead it. 
• Collaborative: What does that mean?  To be collaborative means Salesperson 3.0 will look vertically and horizontally in the farmer’s supply channels.  0 will look for ways to connect better with other vendors (horizontal).  This might involve alliances, joint ventures, co-promotions, etc. They will also look vertically.  This means collaborating with their vendors to better serve their customer.  It might also involve collaborating with their customer in a new way, which allows the farmer to serve a new, different or niche market.  Specialty grains are good examples.  To successfully grow this crop, the producer needs vertical collaboration.  They need vendors who supply seed, a nearby elevator who provides storage and handling, and a transport company that gets it to the eventual end user. 
• A Big Thinker on a Small Scale: The farmer is being deluged with big ideas through direct ads on every social media platform.  They see these big picture ideas, but often have no idea how to implement them on their farm.  Nor do they know whether or not it’s effective or profitable to implement these big picture ideas.  Your customer is looking for Salesperson 3.0 to bring some common sense management decisions to their farm.  0 will need to be able to explain the technology, where it’s a fit and where it’s not.
• Faster & Better adoption of change: 0 will be a Master Change Agent.  Here’s a thought.  Instead of fighting change and clinging to the old way, what if you became the most excited, change agent on your team?  What if you went to the next product training and instead of bemoaning change, you jumped in and started clicking every button and option on the new technology?  It’s really your choice.  You could do it if you wanted.  If so, you would be taking the first steps towards becoming 3.0.

The last piece of the puzzle in becoming Salesperson 3.0 is making sure it’s profitable for you and your company.  Many of the above activities don’t have an increased direct cost to your company.  Learning to be smarter on your products and your industry, embracing technology, and bringing all your resources to bare are free in terms of cash outlay.  However, they do come at a time cost.  Collaboration takes time.  Bringing your internal resources to the customer takes your production and trucking manager away from doing their normal roles.  That time does have a cost.

One of the most important roles of Salesperson 3.0 is making sure they are spending that time with the right customers.  There needs to be an ROI on 3.0’s time or all the effort is wasted.  The right customer means big enough to make success worth the time.  It also means a customer that won’t price shop you against the competition who don’t offer the kind of expertise you do.  If they do this type of unfair comparison, Salesperson 3.0 will move on.  Being Faster, Smarter and Better needs to be something a customer values and pays for. 

Maybe we could call them Customer 3.0!