5 Actionable Ways to Improve Your Sales Experience

As any good marketer knows, having a good buyer experience can almost market itself. If your sales process is simple and easy, people are more likely to do business with you. Effective salespeople excel at communication, active listening, public speaking, social psychology, and many other things besides negotiation and closing. So what does sales excellence look like? 

1. A strong prospect pipeline
2. Good communication
3. Simple responses
4. Proper etiquette
5. Effective technology

Pipeline

There are a finite number of acres and farmers a retailer can prospect, and it can take months to get a sale. The only way to improve the sales experience is to commit to doing a fair amount more than the required minimum. Due diligence requires your sellers to beef up the pipeline of prospects consistently. Still, it helps as the additions combined with the professional follow-up almost ensure business growth. 

Communication

A lot of salespeople begin selling from the moment they first encounter their prospect face to face. Aggressive selling right at the start is generally not a good practice. A better method is to first learn the answer as to why the customer agreed to consider your business initially. They must have a problem that requires a solution.

Meetings should have variations for each type of ideal prospect. Every customer has different product needs, pain points, yield goals, and objections. Sellers should be prepared to address their unique needs. It will feel scripted if a conversation is too generalized, setting the meeting up for a quick closed-lost situation. In ag, relationships are what give retailers a competitive advantage, so make sure your sellers have what they need to build iron-clad relationships with their farmers.

The solution? Role-play training. Role-play training sessions can teach your sales reps to make their customer meetings feel more natural and authentic. Let’s look at an example of how you can structure your sessions.  

Set aside some time periodically to gather the team and practice running through the role-play scenarios you create. Maybe that looks like a monthly meeting or even a quarterly one. One potential cadence could be to switch things up at the beginning of every stage (i.e., planning, planting, growing, & harvesting). Doing so would ensure reps are always speaking about information and products relevant to their customer.

• Divide everyone into pairs and assign one as the farmer and one as themselves (an ag retailer)
• In a fishbowl, have scenarios written out for both the farmer and the retailer to choose from. Examples may be: 
  • If the farmer doesn’t have time to speak with you, how do you ask for a follow-up conversation later?
  • How to convince a farmer to give you part of a field to demonstrate a new product.
  • How your company’s services are different from the competition. 
• Have participants practice different selling strategies while following the scenarios they chose.
• Offer feedback on what they did well and what they could improve.

Simplicity

Once a customer feels comfortable with all of the insights received and research completed, it is the retailer’s turn to speak or respond to requests. The one element is to keep responses SIMPLE. 

Customer painpoints should be spoken to first. Added ideas or fine print should be at the bottom of the proposal and marked as “Extra Ideas.” The word “Ideas” eliminates pressure but indicates they should consider each one. This is another way to build the initial sale at hand.

Etiquette

Politeness and consideration of what the prospect has to say go a long way. Most people forget this aspect, so when a seller has good etiquette, it doesn’t go unnoticed. Sellers sometimes feel so much pressure to make the sale that they push thoughtfulness aside, but they have to keep in mind that a farmer is constantly faced with companies trying to sell to them. 

The angle most of these companies try is telling the farmer that everything they’re doing in their field is wrong and that they MUST use whatever product is being sold to them. It’s better to approach a prospective customer understanding that they will be defensive to tactics like that. Starting on the idea that your team is there to help and not to convince them that they are doing something wrong will immediately set your business apart from competitors.

Every step of the way indicates an appreciation for the customer’s time and shared insights. Be confident that your team answered all of their questions. Make sure they ask customers if they need anything else before making a decision. 

Technology

When a farmer has a problem, they seek out the help of their ag retailer (in most cases). Here is where learning the ins and outs of the technology available to collect data for farming operations come in handy.

From the data they collect, ag retailers can develop a feasible solution to customer problems and even demonstrate the potential effects of the proposed solution. Your team can’t help solve farm operation problems if they don’t have all the pieces to the puzzle. If one of your reps makes recommendations without seeing everything, they could cause more problems, not create a solution.

Sellers handle a lot of information; seed price, chemistry formulations, application schedules, and more. Sure, the Rolodex of the past or filing cabinets are great, but you can get automated solutions with technology, making managing accounts hands-free.

This information and data about a farming operation can make orders based on the individual farm data, not an assumed interpretation of data. Even more critical, technology users can create and customize crop programs as data comes in. Software that allows ag retailers to be involved in their farming customer’s operations is available and adapted for virtually every position in the agribusiness industry.

All of the above grows overall customer appreciation, and more prospects will convert into customers. Because you’ve improved your sales experience, customers will feel comfortable trusting your team, so in turn, sales grow within each account.

Farmers are very busy and have multiple issues to worry about at any given time. When you can make the sales process easy, you’re helping them check something off their to-do list and move on to the next issue at hand. 

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