The Blog for the Ag Sales Professional
An Agriculture blog dedicated to selling in agribusiness. These Ag blog articles focus on the best practices for selling to farmers and livestock producers. We also focus on those salespeople who call on Ag buyers at the thousands of agribusinesses that serve the farming community
Trust: The ultimate sales relationship tool A lifetime to build but can be lost in a second “How much money do you earn a year?” “When are you planning to retire?” “When are you going to propose to her?” Could you even imagine asking these questions at a social gathering, the first time you met […]
If you aren’t convinced, how can you expect your customer to buy? There’s an old adage in sales that says – The first sale is always to yourself. Meaning, you have to be convinced that you are doing the best thing for you, your company and your customer by the product or service that you […]
Which do you need help with? Eventually, the answer is “Yes” to both. However, you need to know which area of your selling process you should work on first. Selling better is a matter of your selling skills Selling more is a matter of getting in front of more prospects or customers. Both are important, […]
Use DISC to: understand yourself better, improve team dynamics and grow sales Hi-D…Hi-C… I didn’t know if we were talking about vitamins or fruit drinks. I was 30 minutes into a three-day course on people skills and trying to catch up on the conversation. Brian (a fellow classmate) was explaining one of his customers, […]
Don’t forget to have fun Sooner or later as an Ag Sales Professional, you will have a customer service issue like the one I had. It’s not a matter of if, but when. So, get good at handling them to keep from losing a customer over it. Driving up to my customer’s feed mill, […]
Learn how to deal with the Polarity Responder No, this is not an article about the song by Chubby Checker. The Twist I am referring to is the Polarity Twist. Flipping through some magazines at my local library, I came across a psychology magazine that ran an article on something called a “Polarity Responder”. Since […]
Everyone can benefit from increasing their coachability Over the last 26 years of coaching salespeople, I’ve found most are open to coaching at some level. Often, they are more open to coaching than me. However, occasionally I’ve run across that really stubborn individual that just doesn’t want to receive coaching. For easier understanding, I’ll […]
You Lead Teams, Manage Things and You Coach the Individual It’s happening all across the agribusiness industry: Mergers, Acquisitions, and Consolidation. One of the results of these three events is overloading your sales managers. Now, I understand the thought process of increasing a sales manager’s workload and adding salespeople to their area. Sales managers are […]