The 4 Bottlenecks in your Ag sales territory

And how to minimize or remove them

Every business has a bottleneck.

On your next walk through or tour of any feed mill, grain elevator, Ag retailer, Ag lending office, or equipment dealer, ask this one simple question. “What is the biggest bottleneck holding you or this business back from doing more?” If they manufacture 15 tons per hour, then ask them the number one reason they don’t produce 20, 30, or 40 tons/hour. I guarantee you, they will know immediately.

And your sales territory is no different. It is a business, and it has bottlenecks. What about you and your territory? If you are selling $1 million in products, then ask yourself. “What is keeping me from growing that to 2, 4, or 6 million?” In other words, “What’s the bottleneck?” Most salespeople will answer that question with the one-word answer, “Time!” I completely get that. So, let’s break down how a salesperson spends their time.

After coaching hundreds of Ag salespeople and growing my own sales territory, here are the four bottlenecks holding most of us back.

Customer Load:

This is the basis of your territory. You have a set of customers who are buying from you. They deserve your primary focus for several reasons. It took a long time to get them. They have committed to you and your company, which involves a certain level of trust that you will help them. Lastly, it takes more effort to replace lost customers than to keep your current loyal customers.

Here is one view of this group. If you are currently meeting your sales goals and not losing customers, then you don’t have much of a problem. However, most salespeople I know will over-service their current customers. This loads up their calendar and prevents them from prospecting new customers to grow their territory. In these cases, the salesperson is often not meeting the expectations of their company for their territory. Yet, they tell me there is no time to prospect. This needs to be solved first, and then focus on prospecting funnels. Customer segmentation is the top solution in this situation.

2. Prospecting Funnel

Next, we want to look at the prospect funnel to see what is slowing this down.

In general, we need to:

Find prospects
Connect and make contact
Discover their needs and our fit
Position a solution
Follow up
Clean it up and keep prospects moving

Most sales funnels struggle with the first and second steps. They either find too many prospects and fail to niche their focus on the best ones. Or, they find too few prospects and struggle to get enough into the later steps of prospecting. The third and maybe biggest issue is fear of cold calling. At some point, you have to make contact with the prospect, often with a cold call approach. While it feels awkward, there are several easy ways to get past this bottleneck.

3. Geography

This is a tough one in Ag. We typically have large geographies. I once worked with a team that shuttled its sales team around their territory in a small company plane. While that’s extreme, the norm is trying to cover a geography that is too big to cover in depth.

There are several thoughts on this. However, I like to offer this perspective to those salespeople I coach. “You can go an inch deep, a mile wide. Or you can go an inch wide and a mile deep into your niche.” When confronted with the bottleneck of geography, niche down until you feel comfortable with how big of an area you want to focus on. Deadhead miles are a killer to your productivity. Check your mileage against your neighbor’s (your peer’s). Obviously, select someone with a similar geography and sales results. If you are driving considerably more than them, it’s time to start planning and focusing. It’s much more efficient to grow your business in an area where you already have a solid set of customers. When geography becomes a problem, I usually find that the salesperson has established strong accounts in the corners of their territory, versus in one area. This means they can’t ignore any of them and are forced into a lot of driving to maintain them.

I know that every once in a while, you need to throw some product in your pickup and drive across your entire territory to deliver a few bags. That’s ok, but realize that you are a very expensive delivery driver. Try not to make it routine.

4. Non-Sales Activities

Meetings, Zoom calls, and Admin activities can eat up the better part of a productive sales day. In some cases, I have seen a company overload the sales team with these activities. However, most of the time, the salesperson just doesn’t like these activities. If they are truly inhibiting your ability to sell, then start by having an open discussion with your manager.

Prime selling time is typically 9-5 Tuesday through Thursday. Mondays and Fridays aren’t as productive and can be better times for non-sales activities. Maybe you can convince your manager to schedule them at a better time.

The next option is to determine who else could accomplish these activities besides your well-trained salespeople. This is not elitism. They don’t get a free pass. It’s using your resources for the best purpose of reaching the company’s goals. After all, they have some big priorities for growing their sales results. Time might be better spent on that goal.

How to approach these bottlenecks:

Identify and recognize them: This is step one. Spend time thinking about these four areas in order from one to four. Which do you feel has the biggest impact on your sales results? Discuss it with others on your team: your peers, your manager, and other managers as well.
Establish the impact of the bottlenecks: This is critical. What is this bottleneck costing you and the company? Try to establish this before asking your manager to help make any changes. What results will be achieved if that bottleneck is removed or reduced?
Flexibility of change: How flexible are you and your company? Do you have the ability to make small or large changes in order to solve the bottleneck? In some cases, this might mean giving up customers or geography to make everyone more efficient. Can you handle it? Or are you prone to hoarding? Can you truly let go of some of your expectations to grow your business and your company’s?

As you venture out into the country today for that long drive to see a prospect, start to think of these bottleneck areas and how you might solve them. Keep in mind that once you solve for one bottleneck, another will take its place. As you become more effective, the bottlenecks will become less and less.

Efficiency increases as will your sales!