Alone in a Sea of Customers

Isolated among customers, kids and COVID

It’s Thanksgiving week. You haven’t physically been in front of a customer in weeks or months. Covid is hitting closer to home than the first six months of the pandemic. Your rural community has a spike in cases. Your customers have family members coming down with it. At your companies’ local facility, several have come down with it and your office is closed. Your own family may have a case or two.

All of this is causing isolation at one of the busiest times for agribusiness sales. Post-harvest is when producers know their yields. They meet with their accountant to decide where to spend or not to spend. January ushers in the show season. However, these are all virtual for January through March.

Wherever you turn, the challenge of isolation is present. For Ag sales professionals who get up every day and drive the farm roads to see customers, this can seem even worse.

Here are a few of my perspectives as we head into Thanksgiving.

This is affecting everyone: The simple realization that you are not the only one affected by the situation. Seems pretty basic and common sense. However, when the isolation hits you hard, this is easy to forget. Social media and TV show a picture of people out in the world engaging life. Yet, everywhere you turn, there is another need to isolate.
Don’t turn off the TV and Social Media: What? I might be the only person in the world to make that statement. Everywhere you turn, the advice rings out to turn off TV and avoid social media. I greatly disagree. At times, these are the only methods of connecting with the outside world. The secret is to know which TV and which social media is helpful. They provide momentary breaks in your mental ruminations. Some call this escaping reality. Whatever you call it, these short breaks are exactly that: breaks in your thought pattern. The isolation thought pattern can build on itself. I want to emphasize short breaks. If it is binge watching 17 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy, you might be on a bad path. Just about all electronics have settings that can be used to create alerts, limit time, block specific social media, etc. Use them to help social media keep you positively connected to the world.

For example, on a daily basis, you can scour a dozen industry update emails, grab three to five pertinent articles and read them. Reaching out to those who wrote the articles, gives you a way to dig a little deeper into the social media connection.

What to do as an Ag Sales Professional?

Customer Isolation and Interaction: Above, I mentioned that everyone is being affected by isolation. Well, your customers and prospects are part of that everyone. While producers seem like they are living isolated on a farm, there can be quite a bit of social interaction that happens on a daily basis. This is especially true if livestock are involved. A herd or flock, requires a higher amount of manual labor, which requires more interaction. On most days, a crop producer will see a series of salespeople on the farm. From crop inputs, to equipment salespeople to service providers. So, producers weren’t completely isolated before.

Stay connected: Continue to call, text, email and (safely) visit your customers and prospects. Too many salespeople think they can’t reach out if they don’t have an answer. We are in an environment where no one has the answer. Trade wars, commodity markets, and pandemic interruptions have created an agribusiness environment that is extremely difficult to forecast. In times of uncertainty, customers need to hear from you more often than they did before. The natural tendency is to avoid calling customers when you don’t really know all the answers to their most common questions. When will your offices and manufacturing facility be open? When will we be back to normal? When will we see $6 corn?
Competition’s reaction: Look around your industry and see what your competition is doing. Are their customer interactions increasing, decreasing or about the same? What changes to products and services have they made? Recently, I worked with a team whose competitors completely stopped connecting with customers. The main office was still sending out emails and hard copy invoices. However, the competing salespeople in this market had stopped calling on customers. I asked if that meant physically stopped calling on customers or completely stopped connecting (phone, text, etc.). They said customers hadn’t heard from their salesperson in months. What an opportunity to provide some form of connection to these prospects. Just the simple fact of being there when times are tough is enough to convince a customer that you can be trusted in tough times. It doesn’t mean the competition is bad and doesn’t care. I’m sure they have their reasons for their actions. But in this case, with these producers, it is not helping them keep customers.
Focus on what you can affect: On any given sales call, it is too easy to stray off into a discussion on trade wars and Covid. If you are not involved directly in those negotiations, I highly recommend that you smile, nod and steer the conversation back towards those areas you can have an affect on. That’s why you asked for the appointment in the first place; to help this customer with your products.

As we roll into the new year and think there is some magical end to all of this, I want you to be mentally prepared. Please read my article from April: Re-opening sales in agribusiness or the Podcast version. The Stockdale Principle is definitely something you want to keep in mind.

In many of our territories, we were able to avoid the shut down for quite some time. Now, it seems inevitable even in rural communities. With the length of time this has been going on, we easily run into fatigue or burn out from the topic. “The new normal”, “Zoom fatigue”, “Social distancing”, “Challenging times”, “Unprecedented times”, the mask debate. Over a long period of time, ten months in this case, we become immune to or irritated by the terms themselves. Every day in the public, we are bombarded with the terms. Again, your customers are no different. They see and hear it just like you do. Give them a break. At a bare minimum, don’t bring it up! If it does come up, obviously we want to show some empathy and let them vent. Then look for an opportunity to shift the conversation.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________