Sales Team Evolution

Go-To-Market changes in a post-Pandemic world

First published in WABA Quarterly Magazine: Summer 2021 issue 

How will you position your sales team to be successful
and profitable for the company?

In every generation, there is that moment when life will never be the same.  These cataclysmic moments change us forever.  We will refer to life before and life after these events.  The pandemic will be that moment for our generation; just as the Great Depression and WWII were for our parents/grandparents.  These world events don’t necessarily cause evolution, but they speed it up.  They bring focused efforts to solve problems or create new ways of operating.

The effects of the pandemic have reached into every life in every industry.  The most impactful being the devastation to human life.  From there, we get into the impact on medical treatment, travel, food consumption, and public gatherings of any kind.  In agribusiness, we have to consider a whole new set of concerns in almost every activity we do.  Employee health has to be protected while honoring their health choices.  We have to provide multiple options for how employees work and participate in activities.  Customers need to know we are doing everything possible to develop safe ways for them to buy our products and use our services.

          Go-To-Market Evolution:  Sales Team

How have we changed as a sales force in the last 14 months?  We all learned how to Zoom, unmute and turn our camera on.  We got more done by phone, text, email.  Much has been written about the changes to on-farm selling during the pandemic.  See “On Farm Selling During Covid” in the last issue.  However, little has been written about how your go-to-market strategy will change as a result of Covid.

         Market Forces:

 Before digging into the evolution of your sales team, let’s examine a few market forces that have been going on.  Some of the market forces are not specific to agribusiness.  However, we need to keep our eyes on the rest of the business world as many of these market forces will move into agribusiness in time.  Some may not affect your business at all.  While others can completely change how you approach your marketplace, especially your sales team structure.

• Generational Changes: The Baby Boomers (57-76 years old) are in their prime from a farm ownership standpoint.  Yet, in their 70’s, many will make the transfer to the next generation.
  • Employees: Quality of work life, diversity, health and opportunity are winning in importance over career advancement and total lifelong devotion.
• Where we Shop: Shopping is not buying.  Shopping is looking, evaluating, and learning.  Producers go to Farm Progress, Husker Harvest Days, and the National Machinery Show to shop and dream of the top end products.  With these shows cancelled and many of our locations closed, the internet became the source of information.  A recent study on tractor equipment and parts buyers showed the importance of your website, high quality pictures, schematics, and YouTube videos.  Our customers want to learn about us online and then come into our location to buy.
• Where we Buy: Obviously, this is also shifting to more online purchasing.  No, it won’t replace all in-person customers in our lifetime.  Yet, we have to consider it as a very strong trend.  Several large agribusinesses focus on this method as their primary go-to-market strategy.
• Loyalty & Expectations: With increased information sources, customers are naturally going to learn more about us and our competition.  Our customers are being targeted hourly, through multiple media outlets.  That targeting is becoming more and more specific to the exact buyers of our products.  As any vendor does, we stumble from time to time.  We make mistakes.  With multiple options at the touch of their smart phone, customers have a reduced tolerance for these mistakes.  They expect us to deliver on what we promise.  Often, that promise is not from a salesperson or local retail location.  Often, it’s from an advertisement, an email or professionally made video.  Imagine if every time you went to McDonalds and expected the experience to be like the commercial or expected the burger to look like the picture on the display.  Your loyalty to eating there would suffer.  To test this in your company, pull together the sales, marketing and customer service teams.  Review your online presence.  Then ask your sales and customer service teams to verify that it matches the real world customer experience.
• Niches and Riches: There’s an old saying in business, “There’s Riches in Niches”.  Not more than six months ago, this was a hot topic in agribusiness.  With the primary corn/soy/wheat markets at or below breakeven, producers were looking for a profitable alternative.  Non-GMO, organic, hemp, local beef, etc.  In the Ag equipment business, the 40-100 HP equipment has been carrying a large part of the store profits for many years as the big equipment sales are under pressure from low grain prices.  Quieted for now with higher grain prices, the niche market concepts will return as grain drops.
• The Gig Economy: Uber, Grub Hub, Upworks, etc.  The gig economy is raging across other industries (taxis, services) and gently easing into agribusiness as it fits.  As new industries develop, the first reaction is laughter or scoffing.  The next is the maverick leaders who try, fail and try again.  Then, a new industry develops.  Keep your eyes and your mind open as more Ag opportunities form.  Is there a grain truck option on Uber?  Not today, but it’s possible.  Try not to be a Wal-Mart chasing an Amazon.

       Ag Sales Team Evolution

          Now, let’s dig into the evolution these market forces can lead to for our future go-to-market strategy

1. Who and How?  In March 2020, most salespeople abruptly stopped calling on their customers.  For many, this extended into last Fall.  In board rooms across the country, sales managers began wondering, “If we didn’t lose customers when we stopped calling on them, do we really need to call on them with an on-farm salesperson?”  During this time, there were also salespeople who had to go out on farm visits.  Maybe not to sell, but to service accounts:  agronomists come to mind.  When they did, those appointments were very planned and discussed.  You no longer just dropped by a farm without an appointment and a purpose.  It made you much more selective on where you spent your time and the purpose for your call.  One of the first evolutions to a sales team structure needs to be: Who do we call on and how do we call on them?  By who, I mean what market segment.  Too often, salespeople are sent into the marketplace to find “any customer with money”.  This leads to just that; a scattered hodgepodge of customers: small, medium, large, and geographically spread to the winds.

2. What services will you provide for Free or a Fee?  In the past, one of the primary roles of the salesperson was to inform customers about products and services.  Today, most customers learn online and then confirm with the on-farm salesperson or at the retail location.  The role of the salesperson is evolving as they have to differentiate to evade a world trying to commoditize their products.  Customized services are a great way for them to differentiate.  Customers are looking to work with a salesperson who can become a trusted advisor.  The question is, will your company provide trained advisors or will you be a low-cost provider, or somewhere in between?  It costs a lot to staff highly trained agronomists who can help plan a producer’s fields or an experienced equipment salesperson who can interpret precision ag data.  If your customer is not willing to pay for it in your products, will you continue to provide it for free? Or a fee?

3. How often are we calling on them?  This question really leads into the last question on your sales team evolution.  However, it stands alone as one of the greatest challenges to sales team productivity.  Salespeople can get into a very deep rut with customers by calling on them too often.  This leads to “I have no time to prospect”.  After figuring out the answer to the first two questions, challenge your salespeople on how often they are calling on customers.  Is there a purpose for those calls?  What are they actually accomplishing on those calls?  If not satisfied, wean them down to only the necessary or productive sales calls.  The rest are just comfort calls.

4. What is Our Customer’s Journey?  The last component of your sales team’s evolution I want you to consider is your customer’s journey.  We all know that, “Customers hate to be sold but they love to buy”.  In workshops, I stress the fact that we will train on the selling process, but none of your customers want to be in it.  However, they are in their own buying process.  If they own crop land, then they are in an equipment and agronomy buying process.  They may not know how to explain it, but they will buy these products over their lifetime.  From where they learn about products, to how they try them out, evaluate options and finally buy; your customers are in their own buying process.

The question that is so often bantered around everywhere is, “When will we go back?  When will it all go away and be like it used to be?”  We can spend a lot of time debating whether or not it will.  My focus and I hope yours is on how we evolve in this new environment, with the current market forces at play?  Following the Great Depression, we had new ways for Wall Street to operate.  After WWII, the middle class came into existence, which spurred too many industries to even mention.  I hope you can use the above framework to lead your sales team through the evolution.