Selling Stress

4 ways to manage your stress when selling

Recently, we have all seen the reports about how stressful farming can be. Our livestock and crop producers work in one of the most stressful professions out there. High debt, low margins, seasonality effects, at the mercy of: the weather, government programs, and international relationships. Add into the mix, long hours, isolation and the expectation to be self-reliant/stoic. After all that, any takers?

All of the above are true and I’m glad there is a lot discussion about mental health help in the agribusiness media. However, I have not seen one article about the mental health issues of you: the salesperson or sales manager that has to work within the ever-increasing challenges of supplying products and services to the farmer. The list of stressors might sound familiar: seasonality, long hours, increasing costs and increasing competition, which normally leads to reduced margin. Add in the usual business stress of generational changes, and rapidly changing technology in a very mature business. Throw a recent trade war on top of a pandemic and it’s enough to make you want to stay isolated in your home office. Here’s my advice: Don’t!

Working with agribusinesses in many different areas, from agronomy, animal nutrition, Ag lending, crop insurance, grain originators, to equipment sales teams, they all are experiencing the same effects as their customers. All day, every day, they get up, drive out to the farm and work with highly stressed customers. Our drivers, our accounts receivables team, our customer service reps, all have to face this environment.

OK, I can hear you now, “Enough already. I get it, Greg. Why are you going on and on about it? Get to the part where you tell me how to deal with it.”

Awareness is the first part of dealing with it. I went on and on because I want you to be acutely aware of how stressful it is. Just like our farmers are supposed to be stoic and self-reliant, we too are in a profession that is expected to be tough, handle any resistance, go for the win, never take “no” for an answer, etc.

How do salespeople deal with it? Some people are doing ok. They might be secure in their customer base; have a segment of profitable producers they work with or maybe they are close to retirement and not stressed about who their customer will be in 5-10 years.

However, most of the salespeople I work with (including myself) deal with the stress of selling in agribusiness in one or more of the following ways. How many are you or your team exhibiting right now?

Avoidance: We tend to move away from pain. So, we stop going to customers that are overly negative, argumentative or bring us down. We find more service work to do for the positive or agreeable customers in our lives, even if it’s not the most profitable or effective use of our time. The pandemic has given us an absolute easy excuse for further isolation from the more difficult customers in our lives.
Blame and Anger: One of the interesting aspects about stress is the different ways that salespeople express it. We covered avoidance or isolation. That’s one method. Another is blame and anger. Often, they look and sound the same. You name it, we can figure out who’s to blame. Then we can externalize our stress and express anger. The driver who leaves a bin lid open…the customer who can’t figure out his invoice….the customer service department that seems to never answer the phone…the accounts receivables person that refuses to write off a $1.95 finance charge on an account that spends $300,000 with your company…the salesperson who lost their password to the CRM program for the fifth time. These are all internal to your company. I didn’t even start on politics, the government, or international trading.
Disguised reactions: I call them disguised because we think they are caused by something else. However, they are the result or expression of the stress. These include self-medication (alcohol, drugs), violence, or depression.

What to do?

First and foremost, the full answer to this question is for you to figure out what works best for you. For some, the stress may not be so severe and you just need a couple days of vacation or one of those pep talks, which I call, “Cheer up champ. It’ll get better”. While others are in a serious condition and may need medical help.

Recognize it: I think we covered that so far.
Talk about it: Find someone you can talk with about it. Keeping it bottled up and trying to tough it out will only make it worse. Over the years, I was lucky enough to have a great sales manager, some great coworkers and my wife to help me through those tough times. Now that my kids are older, it’s great to discuss these challenges with them.
Prepare: Yes, actually prepare for the difficulty or negativity. One of the best ways to prepare is to make every attempt to remove uncertainty. Go find the facts for yourself. Here’s a really important way to prepare. It’s one that I discuss in my presentations. There are 7.5 billion people in the world right now. Every day, they wake up and need three meals. That’s not going away. Someone has to plant the acres, raise the livestock, and process all of those commodities into food for those 7.5 billion people. When you look back at all the tough times in agribusiness, ask yourself. “Did we stop farming?” I’m not saying that certain people didn’t stop farming. I understand. Tough economics in the 80’s made people leave farming. Right now, these economics might make some leave as well. However, that land got planted. You and I still went to the store and looked for hamburger, chicken and a Sunday pot roast. We still go to Subway and get the $5 smoked ham foot long for $6.
Be Proactive: Take positive steps towards a better mental state. All of us can get into the victim mentality. After all, we were just minding our own business, when all these stressful things happened to us. Take control of what you can control. Realize you can’t control the weather, world politics nor can you control other people. This is really hard to come to grips with for all of us in the D quadrant of the DISC profile. For further info on how to be more proactive, see, “They need you now, More than ever before”. This is one of my keynote presentations and it’s message provides seven action items you can take out and implement with your customers.

When selling, the emotional skills we have are as important as the technical skills we bring to the farm. Confidence, positivity, persistence, creativity and flexibility are some of the key elements which allow you to bring your great products to producers. Often, the lack of this emotional intelligence will kill your sale way before you ever asked that great closing question. Producers and agribusiness buyers can tell if you don’t have confidence in what you are saying. They are busy and will ignore and forget you. It takes persistence to go back again. In a mature business with customers that have seen every sales approach, it’s creativity and flexibility that will help you stand out.

Good luck and know that you have people and resources that you can access to help you, right now! Please reach out if I can be that help for you.