My Worst Day at Selling Feed

Losing

            Losing a sale.  Losing a customer.  Losing a peer to a competitor, a co-worker to retirement or a mentor and leader to cancer.  In today’s Ag market, losing your business unit to a merger is a definite likelihood.  It’s a fact of life in sales as well as many areas of life.   Over time, there will be losses.  Most of us are pretty good at winning.  We know what to do.  We celebrate.  We offer thanks to those that helped.  However, it’s the tough losses and how we react to them that shapes how far we will go.  Is it going to be a road block or just a lesson learned?  Is the sun setting in the picture I attached or is it rising?  Luckily for us, we get to make the choice.  By saying that, I don’t mean this is some rosy, glass half full, turn your frown upside down, type of thing.  Losing is painful and not fun.  After writing this series of blogs on my four worst days, I realized they may have sounded a little negative and down.  Why not write about great things that happened and how much fun I had?  Maybe next week.  I think we learn a lot from how others overcome obstacles, challenges and losses.  So, negative maybe in the title of the series but positive in your ability to rise above these types of common challenges.

In the seventh grade, our social studies teacher decided it was time for us to learn about the five stages of death.  Not sure why she felt that need and not sure it was totally approved by the faculty nor was there any note home to parents about it.  We just got a 45-minute video that scared the heck out of us.  The only stages I remember were “Denial” “Fear” and “Acceptance”.  Fast forward 30 years or so and I’m in a series of training sessions on how to deal with change.  Our Six Sigma black belt is training us on the now seven stages of change go from Denial to Awareness, Anger, Resistance, Understanding, Acceptance and finally Advocating.  I found this video much more pleasant than the one I saw as a wide eyed thirteen-year-old.

In Ag sales, we have a special knack for losing customers.  This is both a bad and a good thing.  Bad in that there will be times when you will lose.  Good in the fact that you want to continuously prospect as your competition is eventually going to make your prospect upset.  You want to be there when they are ready to make a change.  I called on a prospect for several years.  He was friendly but staunchly entrenched with his current supplier.  He had been with them for 30 years.  One Saturday morning, I got a call from him.  He wanted me in the store on Monday to switch every product over to mine.  What did I do?  I immediately searched his name and business in the circuit court.  I was sure he was having money problems.  Turns out, after 30 years, his supplier had put his deliveries on the back burner one too many times.  He was mad and made the switch.  Over the next 10 years I worked with him, he was a great customer.

When you work from your remote home and only see a handful of customers a day, coping with losses can be tough in Ag sales.  Here’s a few things you can do to help move through the stages faster and get back in your pickup, ready to continue the fight.

1. Denial……I can’t believe the driver spilled feed all over the ground and then flushed his augers all over the parking lot.  I can’t believe the competition is only charging $6/acre for that fungicide.  I can’t believe the customer left me after all I have done for them.  Get through this stage quickly.  Recognition is the key.  Recognize that it happened.  Let the people know that need to know.  If it’s a big loss, recognize that there might be some shock that you have to get through, which may take some time.  It’s unproductive to stay here very long.  To move forward, start seeking to understand what happened.
2. Anger…. Same as Denial. It’s not productive to stay here very long.  Recognize it.  Express it (non-violently of course).  Talk it out with a peer, your supervisor, your spouse.  Use your deep breathing techniques that get you into your thinking part of your brain.  I don’t recommend stopping the minivan on the side of the road and doing Yoga or stretching, but if really hot under the collar, take a break from the situation.  Whatever you do, don’t start this phase by firing off an angry email or calling everyone you can and yelling at them.  After you feel composed, you can get yourself out of this phase by again seeking to understand.
3. Advocating…. Once you get further down the path, you realize that you can view this whole event in a different light. You still don’t like it and it still wasn’t a pleasant experience.  However, you can accept it and understand how this might be a new beginning.  Part of Advocating is knowing now that you are stronger and more capable of handling adversity than you were in the past.  It happened and it didn’t destroy you.  In addition, you might have even turned the negative incident into a positive customer experience.

One of my fellow sales people had a territory that was dominated by one large customer.  She had a decent number of customers but by volume, this one customer was close to 80% of her territory.  Then it happened.  The customer left in one day.  Closed their doors due to financial issues.  It was certainly devastating and she had to scramble hard to replace the volume of sales.  After only a few days though, she realized that this customer was so high maintenance that they never allowed her time to develop other customers.  Day and night phone calls, endless meetings with them and daily complaints over pricing, quality complaints, competitor prices on our products, etc.  It was an actual relief that she no longer had to deal with them anymore.  Soon, she was making good progress on several prospects and was increasing sales with her other customers.

So, take on your next challenge with enthusiasm that there is a cycle to the loss.  Try not to get stuck in any one phase too long.  If you do, get help.  Getting an outside perspective is a great way to pull you out of a rut.  And as my seventh-grade teacher told us following the video, “Now eat your lunch and get outside for recess to enjoy this beautiful day”.  I think we just kind of wandered aimlessly around the parking lot that day for recess.

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