The Life & Times of an Ag Sales Professional – Junior Year

There’s a life cycle in every career and being an Ag Sales Professional is no different. In most cases, we start out young, with little experience. If we stick with it, we move into our experienced years, where we climb to success and then move into the waning years of our career.

This is the third installment in the series. The last two dealt with Freshman Year as a brand-new sales person. It dealt with some easy to learn aspects of “Things I did Right” and “Things I did wrong”. The second part of this series came out last week and dealt with Sophomore Year. This is where you begin to have some success, but haven’t figured out how or maybe why you’re having success.

In today’s rendition of comparing your career to the stages of high school, we deal with the most productive and rewarding years – Junior Year. Now if you remember all the way back to high school, you will remember how good this year was. Most of us had our driver’s license by this point and we no longer had to ride the school bus. We teamed up with our friends and rode there in style. Well, maybe not in style as two windows didn’t work, the heat only worked after 20 minutes of warming up and most of the tires were bald, not to mention the sounds the car made. Even if the car was brand new, you can only be so cool in your parent’s station wagon. Yes, the kind with wood panel sides. Never the less, you were cool and not riding the bus any longer. You knew how to get around the school, who to talk with to get done what you needed done and which group of kids to hang out with & which to avoid.

How does this experience compare to being an Ag Sales Professional? If you haven’t reached this stage in your territory, no problem. Keep going and it will happen. However, if you have, then you will recognize some of my experiences.

Brought all my resources to bear

By this point, I had the confidence that I didn’t have to know or do it all. There were great people on my team that could add value that I couldn’t. By bringing them to the table with larger customers, we could do something that our competitors weren’t doing. By bringing our ops team to the table, we were able to understand and help the customer manage their inventory, reduce outages, etc. By bringing our admin team to the table, we streamlined the order process and reduced the amount of hand entry for both sides. By bringing several layers of supervisors to the table, we were able to combine several divisions of our company to make a set of products and services that competition couldn’t touch.

Became extremely Efficient

The great part of these years is knowing when and where to go to get things done. And most important, I knew when and where not to go so I didn’t waste my time. I had worked out a system to keep track of a complexity of customers, prospects and projects. At any one time, I had 100-115 customers, 60-70 prospects in the pipeline/funnel and was creating marketing material. These were the days before we separated sales and marketing. So, if I needed a product, promotion or program, I went out and created it. It was a lot to keep a handle on but in these Junior years, I had it figured out. Now, it’s a great feeling to pass these on to someone struggling to keep the chaos of a sales territory under control.

Became a Brand

By this, I mean I had established myself in the marketplace. Enough customers had worked with me that I had a brand that was developing. Not always a perfect brand but the benefits of having this brand were efficiency and referrals. Prospects heard or knew of me and I wasn’t starting from ground zero when calling on them. The credibility was there, so establishing trust was faster. Consequently, this made the sales process faster. It also helped in not needing to chase price as hard as I had to in the beginning. As a complete unknow, prospects would often use price as their resistance. Once prospects know you, your brand and your strengths, the price discussion is reduced. However, price resistance never goes away completely. Be careful of those selling you on the idea that you can eliminate price resistance.

Became a Connector

I stepped way out of my box so to speak. I connected with other industry reps, legal and regulatory groups and trade associations. I connected with anyone that would help me help my customer. If we ever meet, ask me about how it went when I talked with a lead veterinarian in the FDA. I told you, I was pretty far outside my box. However, I learned how to jump back in my box. This was the great part of the Junior Year. I knew how to connect without getting myself or my company into trouble.

I spoke wherever I could to get my message across. I know the fear of public speaking is very strong, but it’s something you can overcome. Just do it. You will be bad in the beginning but you will get better. Go to Toastmasters if you really want to get good at it. Speaking is a very efficient method of building your brand. In my early years, I spoke but wasn’t confident in my material nor did I have a lot to back it up. By my Junior Year in sales, I had something to say, knew how to make it impactful and had firsthand experience to back it up.

Pitfalls:

– Arrogance: The old adage that Success Breeds Failure is appropriate here. It says –

Success breeds Confidence

Confidence breeds Arrogance

Arrogance breeds Complacency

Complacency Breeds Failure

This can be a challenge during these years as success seems to be just falling in your lap. You can pick and choose who you want to work with and you are being heralded by your company. Learn to recognize the signs of this symptom of success. If you can’t, get a trusted peer to keep your ego in check. I didn’t say destroy your ego. Just keep it in check.

– Lack of improvement: It happens. We are busy. We have an efficient system that is working for us. So, why change? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The problem is that our competitors are always circling. If you are enjoying good margins, then it will be discovered and either copied or improved upon. If copied, then you and your approach are now the new norm. You have to continuously expand your strengths and re-establish your value to customers.

– Fixate on a narrow path: This is similar to Lack of Improvement. This happens when we have enough success doing only what we are either really good at or only what we really like to do – or both. I can remember dairy nutrition consultants that “only” sold lactating rations. Right or wrong, this practice ignored calf feed and other high margin add on products we offered. I’m sure it made them more efficient and helped them establish their expertise in balancing dairy rations. If they were able to find enough customers that valued that kind of focus, then great. Just be cautious when that narrow path gets even narrower or begins to disappear.

The Junior year of your career are truly the “Golden Years” as you feel very confident and you have a lot of success. It’s the apex of a lot of time and hard work that you put in to get there. My goal with this article is to help you stay there. I saw some sales people that were able to stay in these years until retirement, some that only held on for a year or two and a bunch that never got there.

There’s a famous commercial that ends with the tag line “Stay thirsty my friends!” and I think it fits here. Fight off the complacency that will eventually creep into your mind and stay thirsty or stay hungry or whichever feeling makes you go out and look for ways to stay on top of your game in your Junior Year.

Find out how I can work with you or your team, contact me directly at Greg@GregMartinelli.net