SeedSeller Academy

Can You Explain Who You Are? [Academy]

Can You Explain Who You Are?

If you ask who I am and I tell you my name is Rod, Rod Osthus, you really wouldn’t know who I
am. You wouldn’t know why I exist. You would only know my name, what I call myself. You
wouldn’t know my true identity.

My true identity is much more than my name. It’s more than just the color of my hair, the color
of my eyes, my height, or my weight. My true identity is what you can’t see and that’s what’s
inside me. The invisible part of me that makes me the person I am is my true identity. It’s the
part that needs to be explained if you really want to know the real me. What you need to know
is what I think about most of the time, what drives me and how I treat people? You want to
know what real value comes from my existence and do I spend most of my time thinking about
myself or about to help other people?

Those are the things that make up my true identity and the only things anyone else cares about. When you asked me to identify myself you actually wanted to know, “Who I am and why do I exist?”

As a seed seller, how many times in a week do you tell someone who you work for? You say your company’s name but it doesn’t tell the person who your company really is. They may be familiar with your company, having seen your signs, recognize the colors of your company logo and so, but they have no idea who your company is or what it stands for. What prospects and customers really want to know is, who is _____________________________ put your company name in that blank?

For example, someone says, who is RC Thomas? The common reply would be The No.1 Seed Sales and Consulting firm in North America. But that wouldn’t tell them who RC Thomas is or give them our true identity, plus no one cares if we’re no.1 or no. 21. That’s not our true identity. Our true identity is why we exist.

So if I said, RC Thomas teaches sales reps how to double their seed sales in 3 years while helping their customers increase profitability by 10% the first year they work together, they would know who RC Thomas Company is and why the company exists. You need to know the invisible part of RC Thomas that you don’t see in a name,
a sign, or a logo. I call that creating a one-line bio that tells who you are and the value you bring.

What’s your company’s identity? What do you say when someone asks who you sell for and what they do? Why does your company exist? When developing your one-line bio here are a couple of things to think about.

One, what do you stand for?

How will you impact customers?

Are you the second largest seed company in the nation, well no one cares, or do you actually help farmers increase their yields by 10% the first year you work together which everyone cares about?

Two, is your company a hundred years old or a third-generation seed supplier, Well no one cares. Or do you help farmers lower the cost of every bushel they produce by 10% the first year by showing them how to raise yields to new levels?

Three, do you say you have the best service in the industry, which is what every other company claims, or do you guarantee to solve any problem a customer may have in 24 hours or they receive $1000 dollars?

What sets you apart from all other seed companies? What is your true identity. Figure it out so people know who you are and what you represent. Once you have your identity figured out, put it into one sentence and that will become the one-line bio about your company you will use every time someone asks who you sell for. That also tells everyone who YOU ARE.

After all, YOU ARE THE COMPANY YOU REPRESENT.

So, who are YOU? Figure that out too.

Happy Selling, 

Rod

Top 10 Regrets Seed Sellers Have After Harvest [Academy 101]

The Power of Deadlines [Academy]

Let’s talk about The Power of Deadlines

I want to go back to an article I wrote a number of years ago that got so much response I want to repeat it again. Many of you remember a movie called Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks. It’s based on a true story that occurred on April 13, 1970. 

Apollo 13 was to be the third mission to land on the Moon. But the mission was aborted two days into the flight because on the evening of April 13, when the crew was 200,000 miles from Earth and closing in on the moon, mission controller on the ground, Sy Liebergot saw a low-pressure warning signal on a hydrogen tank in the space craft. The crew flipped the switch for a routine procedure and a moment later, the entire spacecraft shook. Alarm lights lit up in Odyssey and at Mission Control as oxygen pressure fell and power disappeared. The crew notified Mission Control “Houston, we have a problem." An explosion in one of the oxygen tanks crippled the spacecraft during flight and the crew was forced to orbit the Moon without landing. All of you younger people may remember the movie, many of us older folks remember the actual incident when it happened.

NASA’s accident investigation board determined wires were exposed in the oxygen tank through a combination of manufacturing and testing errors before the flight. A spark from an exposed wire tore apart one oxygen tank and damaged another inside the spacecraft. They lost power, part of their oxygen supply and much of their food. 

On Earth, flight director Gene Kranz pulled his shift of controllers off of regular rotation to focus on managing consumables like water and power while other teams worked around the clock to support the crew and reconfigure essential systems, using different, often odd parts of the aircraft to keep them alive and get them back home. It would be another 4 days before they returned home.

Today, Apollo 13's problems stand as a shining example of how NASA solved a life-threatening problems in space in a very short period of time and under a lot of pressure.

Many of us are forced to periodically work under pressure. Sometimes we create the situation ourselves, other times the situation is created for us. Regardless, many of us turn out some of our best work when time is of the essence. Why is that? The reasons are simple.  

Deadlines force the mind to refocus.

Deadlines automatically remove variables that are no longer considered important to achieving the objective. When deadlines are imminent, processes are shortened and goals are most often reached within the shortened time frame. 

Deadlines work because the mind is focused, and all of a person’s energy is put into achieving a single goal. The problem is, most deadlines are too far away. Too many salespeople set goals, which are deadlines, but they’re never achieved because they wait too long to attack the distant goal. When they finally do take them on, so many other elements needed for the goal are no longer available, ie. new customers needed to get an increase. 

I operate best under deadlines and for me, the shorter the deadline the better I work. I find that my creative juices flow the best when I am under pressure to meet a deadline.  I have the greatest focus when I know I HAVE to do it.  

But despite the fact that deadlines are powerful and often very beneficial, I guess being aboard the Apollo 13 takes focusing on a deadline to an entirely new level. When I am under a deadline to write and make a mistake by creating a poor article, I just put it in the trash and start over. Those brave men on Apollo 13 didn't have that option. Meeting their deadline meant life or death. And even though achieving your seed sales goal isn’t life or death to you personally, it can mean life or death to your company. Maybe setting a few more, serious, shortened deadlines for yourself wouldn't be that bad. I look forward to seeing you in outer space, as soon as you send your sales into orbit.

Happy Selling, I’m Rod Osthus

Don’t Knock the Competition [Academy]

Don’t Knock the Competition?

The Golden Rule Of Selling states Never Talk Bad About Competitors.

Regardless of how much a prospect or customer knocks competitors, you can’t “pile on” and knock them too.  They’re allowed to do it, you’re not, especially if the company they’re putting down is one they also buying from. For example, if your wife starts talking bad about her own relatives, you do NOT have the right to jump in the fray and say negative things about them too. That will get you into trouble. 

When sales reps aren’t able to sell themselves and their own company values, it can be tempting to revert to breaking the Golden Rule. But it never works and here’s why. The value of the sales rep takes a nose-dive in customers’ minds the minute the rep starts “knocking” the competition.

This is not only Sales 101,  it’s also common sense.   

A friend and I recently went to a restaurant in a neighboring town and to my surprise, our waiter was a young man who had been working at a great restaurant in the town I live in for more seven years. He left when the restaurant was sold and became under new management. He immediately recognized me and I asked him why he left. He said the new owners were doing a really poor job and all of the staff he had worked with was leaving. He said the food had really gone to the dogs too. I listened as he carried on about how bad it was. Little did he know I had eaten there several times since the new owners took it over and I also know the new manager of the restaurant personally. The food was at least as good or maybe even better than before and the service was great. Many of the old faces were still there. This guy is a great waiter, but my perception of him dropped tremendously as he waxed on about how bad his former place of business was. Regardless of how he felt about the change, he should have said, I left to get a change of scenery and I understand they’re doing very well. End of story.

There are three things that occur in a customer’s mind the minute a reps starts banging on the competition. 

First, the grower discovers the seller is afraid of them.  If he wasn’t afraid of them, he would avoid the topic by making a positive comment about the competitor then move on.  For example the grower might say, “I buy all of my seed from Brand X and I’m happy with them.”  The seller must remember the Golden Rule and say, “They do a nice job, don’t they.”  Now, that company may NOT be doing a nice job, but the farmer knows whether they do or not and is the only one who can criticize them. At that point the seller is free to continue selling his own values, having shown no fear of the competitor.  This ALWAYS works.

Second, when reps knock a competitor, the grower immediately feels insulted.  Any time you attack a competitor that the grower has been doing business with, you’ve told the grower how stupid he is for making that decision. That’s sales suicide with that grower. 

And third, when you slam your competition, whatever level of trust the grower had for you at that point leaves.  People don’t trust those who degrade others because they wonder whether you will talk about them the same way at some point in time.

They know people who degrade others can’t be trusted.  

After all of these years, it’s hard to believe we still need to talk about the Golden Rule. But since we are, the next time you run into your competitor who loves to spread lies and rumors about you and your company, just use this great old line on them.  “Hey John Doe, I’ll make a deal with you.  If you stop telling lies about me, I’ll stop telling the truth about you!”

Happy Selling, I’m Rod Osthus

 

Do You Know How to Win? [Academy]

Do you know how to win?

It’s obvious that some of you do and many of you don’t.  If you’re still using weigh wagons, side-by-side comparisons, and test plots to see if you won, you not only don’t know how to win, but if you lose, you put the responsibility for losing in the wrong place.

It’s harvest season, the time when salespeople go nuts trying to figure out if their varieties won or not. Well just to be clear, the winners in the seed game aren’t the seed reps, their companies, or their varieties. The real heroes, the only winners are the farmers who work hard to maximize yield and profit on their farms regardless of whose seed they planted. If your variety happened to be at the top in a particular field, you’re not the winner, the farmer is because he’s responsible for the result, not you or your variety. You’re just the winner by association with the true winner being the farmer. 

Varieties can’t produce to their maximum potential on their own, they need to be protected from the more than 1000 variables that detract from that potential and that’s the farmer’s job. Farmers need maximum yields to win and those maximum yields come from following certain protocols that direct them toward their goals. So stop trying to take the credit when your varieties do well on customers’ farms.

Do farmers need to rely on their seed rep for advice on which varieties to plant and how maximize their performance by following special protocols?

Of course.

But none of those protocols involve including weigh wagons, test plots or side by sides in the production strategy.

The real, yield building protocols are the Top 5 Factors to produce a Top Crop and when they’re properly employed the farmer is the hero.

He’s the one who executed them.

The bottom line is, stop thinking that you and your varieties are the hero when things go right and put the credit where it’s deserved, on the customer. Give your customers the kudos they deserve and watch them want to give you a repeat performance.

The more you remind customers who follow the Top 5 Factors of the great job they’re doing, the more they will continue to improve their game. Show them as important as varieties are, you’re not relying on them to get you to where you want to go but focusing on helping the farmer every way you can. You need to remember the grower’s participation in the final result and continue to teach them how to win. When you consider the negative impact customers can have on your variety’s performance when protocols aren’t followed, you will stop putting varieties in farmers’ hands and letting them do as they please with them. Instead, you will get them to follow a calculated set of protocols that will ensure achievement of their goals and so they become the winners.

Once you do that, both you and the farmer win.   

There were a lot of surprises this fall, some good and some not so good. The good surprises came in the form of unexpected high yields despite the very dry summer. But the most important thing is to realize there are only two entities competing for the chance to win every year, one is the farmer and the other is the 1000 variables. When farmers follow protocols to the letter and invest everything the have into their crop and win…they are the true winners. Congratulate them and not yourself or the variety. But when things don’t go as planned and the crop was not as good as expected, the winner was the 1000 variables. Sometimes they are so overwhelming there is nothing a farmer can do to overcome their degree of impact. So if the farmer followed the protocols and did everything he could, he was not the loser either. Some things you just can’t control. Recognize how often your customers are the true winners when your varieties perform well and watch them want to repeat their efforts to win again.

Happy Selling, I’m Rod Osthus

    

Be Sure to Cannibalize Yourself [Academy]

Steve Jobs said, “If we don’t cannibalize ourselves, someone else will.”         

At what point are you comfortable with what’s working for you when selling seed?  At what point do you become so comfortable with your talents, level of knowledge, your selling style, and your ability to attract customers that you feel you don’t need to change anything?  According to Steve Jobs, the answer is never.  In fact, he was well known for cannibalizing his own products before competitors had the opportunity to do it.  A great example was the iPod.  The iPod became a huge success but when it did, Steve Jobs spent no time feeling the glory.  He immediately started thinking about how other companies may be bringing music to their handsets and went about creating the iPhone.  He made sure that he never gave competitors the chance to cannibalize his products by doing it himself first.  

What’s working for you right now, that could be cannibalized by a competitor? What kinds of things are working for you right now that you should be destroying before a competitor has the opportunity to do it?  What kinds of things should you be cannibalizing for the sake of staying ahead of everyone else?

The seed industry has always been one that, unless a new product comes to market is slow to change.  It’s had a difficult time changing how it’s sold seed over the past decades.  Companies still rely on programs rather than the talents of the sales rep.  They’re still caught in price wars with customers because they haven’t cannibalized their values and upgraded them beyond everyone else’s.  But in my opinion, the number one thing every company needs to begin cannibalizing is their own sales force.  Mediocrity reigns among field sellers because they have not cannibalized them and made improvements to stay ahead of customers. 

The first thing every sales reps needs to do is cannibalize himself.  Destroy the old you and re-create the new you at the end of each selling season. Change the way you take care of your vehicle. Change your appearance. Build a new storybook and practice that new story.  Learn how to do a better job of staying outside the circle and in control.  Attend at least four days of seed sales training a year to keep up to date on how to sell in the 21^st century.  Remember, it takes special training to learn how to sell a living organism like seed, where you can’t control its performance.  It also requires companies and their sales reps to re-invent themselves every year to give prospects and customers a fresh, new, exciting experience. 

Make some real changes this year.  Start with yourself. Once you do that, you will be different from every competitor and customers will notice by wanting to do business with you. The best part of all, you will be the most successful cannibal in the tribe.  Happy Selling, I’m Rod Osthus

A Salute to Those Who Sell Seed [Academy]

Why Farmers Go Out Of Business? [Academy]

Why Farmers Go Out Of Business?

This podcast should create a lot of controversy, but I’m no stranger to that.

After all, I was first one of all sales trainers to say weigh wagons and test plots were a waste of time.  That created a lot of comments like, “he’s an idiot”. That was more than 30 years ago. I was the first to say farmers don’t buy products on price and never will. They make their decision to buy the most serious input for their farm based only on their belief, likeability and trust in the sales rep. Again, “idiot”.  And again, more than 30 years ago.

So here we are, well into the 21^st century, with the greatest number of high performing seed varieties in history.  They have amazing technologies attached to them and we still can’t seem to milk enough yield potential out of them to keep farmers in business. When the only source of profitability on every farm lies within the varieties they plant, and every variety has the ability to produce 2-3 times what farmers are getting right now, you’d think we’d have figured out how to help farmers harness that potential so they could make a living. But we haven’t. Instead we allow them to blame market prices, input costs and weather, while sales reps try to convince them all they need is a cheaper price or reward program. It’s not the farmer’s fault. He’s been taught to wait to start production planning because seed gets cheaper the longer they wait to order.

Seed companies keep complaining about the decreasing number of farmers, yet they’re the ones who keep driving them out of business. Most seed companies are doing very little for farmers except selling them seed. So many reps aren’t trained well enough to be on the farms of today’s farming professionals. Farmers need leadership. They need help raising more bushels with the tools available but aren’t getting that help. Farmers don’t know what to do to maximize yields because they keep being told yield is dependent on having the latest equipment and technologies. And oh yes, the weather is also a huge factor.  

So what’s the first step to making money in farming today? It’s called early planning. Virtually all of the farmers I’ve helped coach over the years who had the highest yields ever year, despite the weather, all had one thing in common.

They all had their cropping plans in place before harvest...

Have You Ever Been Slapped Across the Face? [Academy]

Have You Ever Been Slapped Across the Face?

I have, many times in the early days of my seed selling career. I quickly learned that every time I got slapped, I deserved it, but it hurt, big time. If you haven’t had it done to you, then you haven’t been selling seed very long. I can tell the novices out there, that when you get slapped, it really wakes you up. It’s also more damaging to the ego than a punch in the nose. A slap across the face signals that, I’m going to slap you because you’re too much of a wuss to take a punch. You punch those you want to fight, but you slap those you want to humiliate. It’s a very condescending move.

Most seed sellers who don’t do their job right, know what I’m talking about. They get slapped across the face all the time, during harvest season that is. That’s when every seed seller who deserves it, gets slapped. You’d think that after getting slapped once, anyone receiving that humiliating gesture would change their ways. I know I did.

Planting season is the time when the seed marketplace winds up its arm to prepare to slap the crap out of well-deserving seed sellers during harvest. That’s 5-6 months of built-up momentum to execute a slap has the potential to not only disorient you as a seed seller but alsos knock you the hell out of the game.

I want you to visual the seed marketplace, extending its arm horizontally to the side, ready to swing it forward, and crack you across the side of your noggin because you didn’t properly prepare customers to ensure they have the best experience during harvest.

Harvest should always be an exciting time for seed sellers, but instead, it’s often just a hard slap across their face. Harvest exposes the results of everything you did or did not do with customers by the time your seed was planted. I’m not just talking about the performance of your varieties; I’m talking about how well you prepared your growers’ minds for the results that always come later in the season. By the time your seed is planted, customers should already be eagerly waiting for harvest to arrive because they understand everything they need to do to have a great experience at harvest...

Harvest Season: When Too Many Relationships Are Buried [Academy]

Harvest Season: When Too Many Relationships Are Buried  

For too many farmers, fall harvest season spells the end of their relationship with some of their seed suppliers. It could have been a first-time association with their seed rep or it may have been a relationship based on years of socializing, trusting, negotiating, joking, and ultimately buying.  

The longer term the relationship the more enjoyable it usually is, but the more devastating it can be for the grower AND the seed seller when it ends.  In long term relationships farmers have not only learned to trust their seed guy, but they have also found him or her fun to deal with. 

But so many relationships will be lost this year following a highly variable harvest season. No, not just product variability, but relationship variability. In fact, harvest season should really be renamed the “Funeral Season.” It should be called a time for “mourning the loss of thousands of relationships” and their interment into the “crypt of low perceptions”.    

Why is fall a time of year when farmers lose so many of their relationships?  Especially ones as important as the ones with their seed guys?  Well, it’s mostly because farmers don’t understand the real value of a seed relationship. They don’t realize that it’s not about yield, and it’s not about product and it certainly isn’t about price. A true seed seller/grower relationship is based totally on dependence.  Because if a farmer takes the time necessary to develop a trusting relationship with his seed supplier, (which takes more than one season) he will have all of those things and more.  But instead, he puts every one of his relationships on the line every year by looking at his “side by side” trial or his “on farm test plot” or his “yield monitor” and shoots himself in the foot by “burying” the relationships of the seed reps whose products didn’t perform to his expectations, despite the kind of growing season he may have had. 

What today’s farmers need more than ever is someone they can rely on, 24/7 for things they need or don’t know they needs. They need a seed leader, someone to tell them when to buy, what to buy, when to pay, how to pay, where to use it, how to use it and how to measure it’s performance.  They need to learn the value of having a relationship with every seed seller they work with.  And when they gets upset with the performance of a certain brand from a certain sales rep, they should not be asking that rep to leave his farm, they should be asking for more help in managing the 1000 variables that affected the performance of that product in the first place. But too often growers sever relationships that actually have the potential to bring them a lot more than just bushels in the field. 

And that’s what they don’t understand...