One-on-one relationships remain at the heart of agricultural mortgage lending. But in 2025, the most successful lenders are those who also understand how to use today’s tech to facilitate regular outreach to prospects, stay up to date on the latest trends in the industry, and streamline business operations.
In this piece, we’ll offer tips from experienced ag lenders on how to rise to (or stay at) the top of your game as an ag lender today.
Note: this piece is adapted from a recent webinar. If you’d rather watch than read, feel free! ⬇️
Attract and Generate Leads
If a farmer doesn’t know you, they can’t do business with you. That’s the first rule. They have options for financing, so they need to know your name.
Obviously, if you have the best interest rate in the market, that will help you attract leads. But what if you don’t? If that’s your situation, you’ve got to find ways to deliver value beyond the transaction. You’ve got to position yourself as their trusted financial partner.
To become trusted, you first have to become known. If you’re new to the field or working a new territory, that takes time. But it’s doable. When Kyle Kauffman, an account manager at Growers Edge, started his first job, he lived an hour and a half away from his customers. He got to know the territory and build relationships by doing the following:
- Partnering with other advisors, including ag retailers, crop consultants, seed vendors, attorneys, auctioneers, and extension agents. All of these folks are part of farmers’ networks of advisors and all of them can open the door to relationships with farmers. Plus, you gain trust by association: if a trusted ag retailer trusts you, a farmer is more likely to as well.
- Co-hosting in-person events with other advisors. You might speak on an ag finance topic while an auctioneer speaks on current trends in farmland values to educate farmers and demonstrate your expertise.
- Showing up at important events – and not just during planting, harvest, and loan renewal. Aim to be at field days, producer conferences, farmers’ kids’ FFA auctions, county fairs, and so on.
- Doing regular farm visits and check-ins. Farm visits are a great way to deepen relationships with one-on-one time.
To keep track of all your activities, Kauffman recommends relying on a digital calendar. That way, when a prospect or client calls, you’ll know at a glance when you’ll be in their area and can easily schedule a time to meet.
Kauffman also urges lending professionals to think beyond in-person interactions. After all, most borrowers today prefer at least a partially digitized lending process. What does that mean for ag lending professionals?
At the bare minimum, your company website should have the things farmers are most likely to want:
- Loan calculators
- Testimonials
- Success stories
- Contact information
Other great tech investments: email and texting. If you aren’t yet using these channels to reach your audience, now is a great time to start. Tools like Hit Em Up let you send segmented group texts that feel personalized. They’re a great way to stay top of mind when you’re not in the same location as potential borrowers.
For the more adventurous – and ambitious – Kauffman recommends creating short-form videos. It’s no secret that this format is popular on social media, from TikTok to Instagram and beyond. Think of short-form videos as the modern replacement for brochures or mailers.
Create videos about current market conditions, how farmers can navigate various challenges, and whatever else you can be helpful about. Then post these to your social channel of choice, make them available via your company website, and text them to the farmers they’ll be most helpful to.
Bottom line, says Kauffman: Be where your target customers are. Local influence matters, and farmers trust local relationships.
Nurture, Qualify, Build Trust
Building relationships helps you attract leads. The next phase is to nurture and qualify those leads while building trust. Brian Weis, managing director of Growers Edge’s mortgage division, offers a four-part framework for accomplishing this:
- Mindset
- Goals
- Plans
- Execution
These four components work together to help you build long-term, mutually beneficial relationships. Here’s how.
First, the mindset necessary to do this long-term work is important: Weis recommends thinking of everyone you meet as either a client today, a client tomorrow, or a referral source.
Too often, he says, mortgage professionals (in agriculture and elsewhere) are pressured to focus only on hot leads. But leads that will close in months or years are equally important.
Key to embracing and living out this mindset is finding ways to stay in touch over the long term. But how often? In what channel? With what information?
To answer those questions, turn to your goals. Generally, goals include things like…
- Income
- Volume
- Number of clients contacted
…etc. Aim for both high-level, long-term goals and shorter-term micro goals that roll up to the bigger ones.
That, of course, requires making plans. Weis suggests working backwards from goals to set daily tasks required to reach those goals, then tracking everything in an Excel habits tracker or an app like Strides.
As you get closer to your goal, you can see whether you’re on track and, if not, what you need to change. E.g., if you’re not following the plan, you need to update your execution. If you are following your plan but aren’t approaching your goal, you may need to change your plan. This is how you nail the execution.
Weis also emphasized that individual conversations are one of the most important parts of the work of nurturing leads. These conversations build rapport and help folks determine whether they’ll want to do business with or refer business to you. So how do you make a good impression during conversations?
Weis recommends these tips:
- Be yourself.
- Establish common ground.
- Engage in active listening.
- Be empathetic and respectful.
- Mirror the person you’re talking to.
- Provide value, education, and solutions.
- Focus on advice, not price.
- Don’t pressure people.
- Be honest.
Weis also recommends staying on top of industry news, which you can do with a variety of resources: the Farm4Profit podcast, AgriTalk radio, AgManager, AgWeb, FarmDoc Daily, and the quarterly Growers Edge Farmland Value Index.
Finally, Weis recommends using a tool like Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, or Zoho to keep track of your prospects.
Close Loans and Maximize Referrals
Eventually, some of your prospects will turn into customers.
Patrick Kerrigan, VP of Business Development at Farmer Mac, offered insight into how to follow up with customers after the close to maintain the positive relationship and maximize your odds that they’ll become a referral source.
First, he says, follow up after closing to see how the transaction went and check to see if they have any questions. Provide whatever help you can and keep notes about any questions they have in your CRM – those will come in handy down the road. (You may even want to send around a small gift like cupcakes to help them celebrate.)
Then, make it a point to educate the borrower about the secondary market details, like who their point of contact will be going forward.
Another tactic Kerrigan recommends is to use your CRM to do periodic follow-ups with borrowers. For example, consider setting up a prompt to remind you to reach out 30 or 45 days ahead of their first scheduled payment. Farmers and ranchers are busy. You don’t want them thinking about that payment for the first time five days before it’s due. Proactive outreach is one way to continue adding value to the relationship.
One particularly powerful way to do proactive outreach is by using a geographic information system (GIS) like Agcor to guide outreach after damaging weather events. Agcor lets you view damage (from flooding, fire, pests, etc.) on a map overlay of your borrowers’ properties, then connect with affected borrowers in just a few clicks. It’s an incredibly powerful way to demonstrate that you care.
On an ongoing basis, Kerrigan says, aim to be a source of high-quality ag-related content for your customers. You might invite them to come to the bank to mingle with LOs and bank executives, hear a presentation on a topic relevant to them, and have lunch. You might send informational videos, as Kauffman recommended.
The goal: stay on your borrowers’ radar so you’re top of mind when they next have a need you can fulfill.
The Right Tech and Tactics Work Together
Nothing can replace genuine relationships in the ag lending industry. At the same time, today’s lenders are expected to keep up with hundreds of leads, a 24-hour news cycle, and borrowers who increasingly expect real-time service.
The best ag lenders today blend their time-tested interpersonal skills with the best of what today’s tech has to offer. For more recommendations on technology and resources that can help ag lenders, check out this resource guide.