When Good Sales Days Go Bad

Despite the best laid plans

You can plan and anticipate and prepare all you want, but there are just going to be those days on territory when things go horribly wrong.

• A customer or prospect you prepared to meet cancels.
• An emergency customer service issue pops up and you have to cancel your meeting with a customer or prospect.
• Weather happens everywhere and often throws a wrench into your plans. In Wisconsin, that wrench was often 6” of snow.  In agriculture, weather often plays a large part of our customer’s daily schedule.  Are you calling on producers during planting time?  Despite your best laid plans to meet with a producer, if the weather cooperates, they plant.  Your meeting just got canceled.
• You get caught in an ambush. No, not a real ambush, but a sales ambush.  You go out to see your customer to present a new product and get hit with a barrage of anger from him instead.  It turns out his last transaction with your company went horribly wrong.  The folks at your feed mill, grain elevator or manufacturing plant just “forgot” to mention it to you.  So, you are now finding out about it for the first time.  FROM YOUR CUSTOMER!
• You have a technology failure. Today’s sales environment requires you to master certain pieces of technology.  Websites, I-pads, PowerPoint, etc.  Most of this technology requires electricity and often an internet connection.  In Ag, we work in some fairly remote areas where the cell towers and internet connections don’t work.  So, we need back up batteries and a backup plan if we can’t get an internet connection.
• Your competition gets the sale on “Alternate Facts” or somewhat less than honorable sales tactics. You go out to present your new product and before you even get started, your customer informs you that they bought from your competitor yesterday.  That’s bad.  What makes it worse is when the customer believed the “not so truthful” sales tactics your competitor uses.

You get the picture.  In real life at real speed, things just go bad sometimes.  Here are a couple thoughts that can help.

1. Prepare:  I know I said these are things that happen despite preparing.  However, you’ve driven this territory and you know where the technology dead spots are.  Stay in touch with your office and let them know you need to know when customers have a bad experience.  Read your CRM program if that’s where your office logs customer complaints.
2. That’s the job: When everything is going bad and the customer is upset and things aren’t working right and chaos is breaking out in your territory, That’s the Job!  That’s why they hired you.  You know how to handle that situation.  If you don’t, trust me this won’t be the last time you have one of these days.  You will get better at handling these days and keeping them in perspective.
3. The customer doesn’t care who’s fault it was. They just want a solution.  Eating at “Eats” one fine morning, my waitress commenced to filling me in on why my order was late.  Seems her and the cook were having an argument over who goes on smoke break.  First, I didn’t care as I just wanted to eat.  Second, I was the only customer in the place.  So, it shouldn’t have been that difficult to time things out to make a couple pancakes.  Third, I didn’t care.  I was just hungry.  Never again have I gone to a restaurant named Eats.  Once was enough.
4. Ag sales is a long-term event. By that I mean you typically don’t just make one sales call or one sale and then you’re done.  Hopefully, you sell the producer for many years to come.  This allows you to have some of the bad events mentioned above and still recover from them.  Customers will understand to some degree.  They realize you don’t control the weather nor the grain markets and will allow you to come back.

Bad days despite all your planning is certainly not justification for not planning.  It’s just a reminder that despite however hard we try; Ag sales is an outdoor sport that involves people.  When you put those two together, you’re bound to have some really bad days.

You will get better and better at putting those days in perspective and rebounding faster.  So fast in fact, you might even follow the state highway snow plow out to your prospect’s driveway!  That’s how important your message is.  Plus, they’re snowed in so they have to be home.

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