Whatever your role at the ag retailer where you work, you’ve recognized the benefits that offering a Crop Plan Warranty could bring to your organization. Chief among them, in our current economic climate: increasing wallet share of existing customers and bringing in new customers looking for more affordable ways to sow their fields.
Now all you have to do is convince the other people at your organization involved in the decision-making process. That’s no small task, in part because most of us (about 85 percent of people, in fact) are not naturally inclined to change. That means we need convincing to do things differently – even if the new way is objectively better than the old.
In this piece, we’ll lay out strategies for getting the rest of your team on board with a Crop Plan Warranty. We’ll offer tactics for winning over CFOs, getting GMs to recognize the value to their teams, and even convincing individual salespeople that a Crop Plan Warranty will help both their sales and their customers.
Background: How the Crop Plan Warranty Works
First, let’s cover the basics. Our Crop Plan Warranty is a flexible financial tool that agricultural retailers can attach to any product, bundle of products, or whole-acre prescription.
When farmers use the inputs as directed and yields fall below expected targets, the warranty pays them in cash. This makes it an excellent tool for…
- Increasing wallet share: If you’d like to encourage customers to buy more crop inputs from you, consider attaching a Crop Plan Warranty to a whole-acre prescription.
- Winning new customers: At a time when interest rates and input prices are high while commodity prices remain low, having a cash-back warranty can give you a competitive edge over your competition.
- Introducing new products: If you’d like to encourage growers to use more innovative, sustainable products in their fields, attaching a Crop Plan Warranty to a product or product bundle can help convince them to do it.
Now let’s take a look at the messaging that can help you get different decision makers on board.
Winning Over the CFO
The CFO’s job is to be skeptical about money. They might resist a Crop Plan Warranty because of the cost: to fund the cash-back guarantee, the retailer does have to invest some money (our warranties are priced at a flat per-acre rate).
Additional costs are unwelcome right now; just as farmers are experiencing razor-thin margins on their crops, retailers are seeing similar margins on their products. The key here: don’t position this as a strategy that leads to additional margin loss but rather as a way to gain margin while also gaining and maintaining business.
How does this work?
- Margin gain: When you use the Crop Plan Warranty on a bundle of products or whole-acre prescription, you can increase the number of products per sale. Another possibility: offering a warranty might help you keep customers who would have otherwise churned this season. Both can help your margins.
- Business gain: In these economic conditions, customer loyalty is thin. Farmers are more likely than ever to be price-sensitive and to be willing to shop around for better prices. A Crop Plan Warranty on a whole-acre prescription might be just the thing to get them to switch to you. And even if you win these customers for financial reasons, you can then retain them with superior customer service.
In brief: an investment in winning new customers today can translate to business gains for years to come.
Winning Over a Head Agronomist or General Manager
If you’re facing resistance from your head agronomist, it may be because they don’t see the need for the Crop Plan Warranty. Maybe they know they have the right products and the right knowledge to guide farmers about which ones to use – their case is airtight. No warranty needed.
In reality, though, the hurdle for customers is generally not logic but loss aversion. Whether you’re trying to sell them brand-new products or simply products they’ve never bought from you before, their inclination (and really, all humans’ inclination) is to focus more on the potential for loss than the potential for gain.
In these circumstances, providing a Crop Plan Warranty can help them clear that hurdle and make the purchase. The warranty, after all, effectively removes the risk of financial loss associated with the purchase.
It can be a more powerful tool than even cold hard data.
Winning Over the Sales Team
The biggest challenge for your sales team will likely be changing how they sell to promote products or prescriptions that include a Crop Plan Warranty.
In fact, this is a challenge that sales leaders see manifest in many ways: often, salespeople are comfortable acting as “order takers” but not as more proactive “sellers.”
When a retailer adopts a Crop Plan Warranty, part of the sales team’s role is to guide farmers to warranty-backed products, bundles, or prescriptions when they’re appropriate. But that may require different conversations than what your team members are used to having.
There are many strategies to get reluctant sellers on board. We explore five in detail in our eBook How Agriculture Sales Leaders Can Inspire Change. Briefly, they boil down to:
- Start small
- Try a bunch of things
- Tap the power of storytelling
- Reduce the risk of trying something new
- Celebrate failures as much as successes
No two salespeople and no two teams are alike. The key is finding techniques that work for the people in your organization.
Leading Change Is an Art. Done Well, Everyone Benefits
It can be frustrating to get pushback on an idea you know is going to benefit both your bottom line and your customers’. But the reality is that change resistance is incredibly common. Figuring out how to overcome that resistance is one of the most powerful skills you can develop.
For more insight on how to master this art, check out our eBook How Agricultural Sales Leaders Can Inspire Change.
If you’d like more details about how a Crop Plan Warranty can improve your organization’s bottom line, let’s set up a conversation.