SeedSeller Academy

Are You Busy Doing Spring Cleaning Your Sales Plan? [Academy]

Are You Busy Doing Spring Cleaning?

Nothing beats the feeling of accomplishment when you get a head start on spring cleaning.

Whether you have only a few hours to freshen things up, or several weeks dedicated to doing a full spring cleaning, it needs to be an essential part of making sure everything is spic and span and in its place.  After all, too much clutter creates stress, increases anxiety and adds roadblocks to a path to smooth living.

By the way, I’m not talking about cleaning and organizing your home or office. I’m talking about cleaning and organizing your sales plan for the upcoming selling season. Think about the sales plan you had last year; how well did it work? What have you done to analyze all of the customer contacts you made during the last selling season to see if they accomplished your goal of changing customer thinking? What needs to be cleaned up, changed, or eliminated in your sales plan?

Ask yourself the following questions about the condition of your sales plan for the new seed marketing season... 

Part 3 - Aging Gracefully [Academy]

We have been focusing on the theme of Not Aging Gracefully. Last week I listed the things that indicate you are aging gracefully and not doing what you could to extend the quality and quantity of your life. Today I will show you how to tell if you are doing things to, if not extend the quantity of your life, to make the quality better. I call it going full throttle.

 

Here Are Indicators You Are a Salesperson Going Full Throttle

■ You are so protective of your sleep that you leave parties and social events early to make sure you get to bed on time, will be well-rested and prepared for your workout the next morning.

■ You start every day with a shower.  

■ You floss your teeth every day, something my dental hygienist says less than 1% of the people do.

■ You always dress better than your customers and your competitors.

■ You look at your vehicle in a critical way every day, making sure it’s sparkling clean inside and out to impress prospects and customers. It’s your on-the-road office, be proud of it.

■ You set a goal every day to do something special for your business, yourself, and someone else.

■ You practice before contacting growers.   

■ You give customers a calendar showing them the weeks and months you will be contacting them during the season and how they will be involved in the contact.

■ You follow every step in the SeedSeller Blueprint to grow your business.

There are many indicators that you are doing everything you can to extend the quality and quantity of your life. You may already be going full throttle, going as fast as you can, flat out, full steam ahead, like a mad man, at a gallop, at top speed, lickety-split, hell bent for election, at warp speed, a mile a minute, like wildfire, as fast as your legs can carry you, having the pedal to the metal, and well, you get the idea. All of those expressions mean the same thing, making life more interesting, exciting, useful, and prolonged. Those terms also apply to the most successful seed sellers I know because they ARE ALL GOING like a bat out a hell. 

Happy Selling, I’m Rod Osthus

Part 2: How Do I Know If I Am Aging Gracefully? [Academy]

I had a lot of feedback from my last podcast on aging gracefully, with a couple of questions that kept coming up. I’m going to handle one of those questions in this podcast and the other one next week. The question I will address today is…

How Do I Know If I Am Aging Gracefully?

Remember last week’s podcast where I talked about the fact that we don’t want to age gracefully. To the average person, aging gracefully means that as we get older we begin to slow down naturally, we start to take life easier, stop doing activities we used to do, gain some weight, and start sleeping in. People who age gracefully believe that’s what they’re supposed to do or deserve to do when they get older. It’s their excuse for slowing down or even becoming lazy. They may even use the excuse my dad used as he got older. He would say, “I’ve gotten my share of exercise and done my share of work over the years, let the young people do it. 

But slowing down and aging gracefully is not my goal and it shouldn’t be yours either. Instead, you should be increasing your commitment to remaining active and working even harder to keep your body and mind moving. In my case, I call it going full throttle. You need to be conscious of how you’re aging because you can start aging gracefully and not even realize it. Before you know it, figuratively speaking you’re an invalid both physically and mentally.  

Of course this concept applies to all people, but right now I’m going to speak to salespeople. Here is a list of indicators that may help anyone in sales answer the question, “How do I know if I’m a sales rep who is aging gracefully?”

You’re a sales rep who is aging gracefully if...

Make Sure You Don’t Age Gracefully [Academy]

Make Sure You Don’t Age Gracefully

One of the greatest compliments I ever received was from one of my dealers back in the days when I was still managing a sales territory.

It was a beautiful spring morning and we had just finished unloading two large truckloads of seed corn into his warehouse, bag by 80,000 kernel bag. This was pre-bulk packaging days. My dealer and I walked outside to dry the sweat from our shirts when he commented that it was his birthday. I said, “Happy birthday, you really look good for turning 55. You’re aging gracefully.”

“Yeah,” he replied, “and I hate it. I wish I was in the kind of shape you are in. I don’t know how you do it,” he said. “You’re on the go all of the time, working hard. You are focused and happy, you find time to work out, you never seem to get tired, and you always have a great attitude.”

“But you look good too and you seem to be aging gracefully,’ I replied.

“I don’t want to age gracefully,” he said. “What’s wrong with aging gracefully?” I asked...

What is the Half-Life of Your LOVE for Selling Seed? [Academy]

How long have you been selling seed? What was your level of enthusiasm for the job the first year you started selling and what is it now? Has your love for calling on farmers increased, stayed the same or decreased over the years? It’s easy for customers to tell how much you love what you do. But most reps don’t monitor their level of love for the business to make sure it never wavers.

The reason you need to monitor your love for selling seed is because that love can have a half-life. The term half-life refers to how long it takes for the full concentration of something to be cut in half. Half-life is used in the drug industry to monitor drugs to determine how fast they decrease from their full potency to half potency in the body. For example, a drug would have negligible therapeutic effect in the body after 4 half-lives. That means, it goes from 100% potency to 50%, from 50% to 25%, from 25% to 12.5% and from 12.5% to only 6.25% potency of the original dose. So, does your love for selling seed have a half-life? Has it decreased at some level since you started? 

What level is it at...

Are You Smarter Than a 4-Year Old?? [Academy]

The average 4-year-old child asks over 400 questions a day. They’re constantly using their brains. It’s been found that children use their brains twice as often as adults when it comes to learning and putting that learning to use. Not surprising, all of that learning starts in the crib. Research shows that a positive learning environment at the youngest ages increases IQ.  The more you read, talk, and teach young children, the faster their brains learn and keep on learning. The environment kids are in early in life has a great influence on their IQ.

It may not be surprising that kids learn more than adults, heck, they’re younger.

But the real difference is kids never want to stop learning. That’s why they ask all of those questions. Adult brains are fully developed by age 25, but many of us stop learning by the time we are no longer in a classroom...

You Can’t Ride Two Horses with One Ass [Start Your Week]

Do You Hug Your Customers? [Start Your Week]

Do You Hug Your Customers?

I know what you’re thinking right now.  Just hearing the title of this podcast caused you to think that Rod has really lost it this time. I thought he was crazy when he said he wears a sport on sales calls, but the idea of hugging customers goes way too far. 

Well, before you stop listening, hear me out. I’m not going to tell you to hug customers. I would be the LAST person to suggest you do that without good reason. But just so you know, if a customer is a good friend you haven’t seen for a long time, a hug may be warranted. Or if a customer suffers a great personal loss, that may also call for a hug. Hugging is one of the most effective ways you can comfort someone, make them feel loved and make them feel better. It’s also one of the fastest ways to increase a very important relationship building hormone in the body, oxytocin. In fact, any kind of physical touch will have a positive effect on oxytocin. If you go to certain countries, kissing on the cheek is the custom. I learned that every time I went to Brazil and Argentina. But the United States is one of the few countries where kissing on the cheek or hugging is an uncomfortable thing to do with anyone you meet, even relatives. However,  there are ways to make people feel good without hugging them...

Are Your Customers Failing 99% of the Time? [Start Your Week]

Are Your Customers Failing 99% of the Time?

Research is full of trials that don’t work. For example, plant breeding is 99% failure and only 1% success. That means 99% of the time plant breeders fail to achieve their goal of developing a better variety because the plants they’re working with can’t defend themselves sufficiently against the environment and produce top yields at the same time. 

I was a corn breeder for more than five years. My job was to take a group of corn plants and expose them to as many different, challenging environments as possible, while measuring how well they yielded under those conditions. We would plant the seed three inches deep in the spring to select for seedling vigor, inoculate them with all kinds of diseases, and apply different forces on the growing plants to see which ones wouldn’t green snap. I would select only the plants that passed all of the tests with flying colors and cross them with other plants of a different family that passed the same tests. As strange as it may sound, one of my goals at the end of each season was to throw away as much breeding material as possible and keep only the very best. Many plant researchers don’t think that way because their egos won’t let them. But if the plants you’re currently working with can’t defend themselves against the environments they’re exposed to, they don’t get a second chance. That’s why each fall when it came time to harvest MY breeding nursery, I asked our Director Research to walk through it and tag only the plants he thought should be kept. I would discard the rest. When he was done, he had usually tagged 99% of the plants in my nursery. Although it was hard to watch, I knew it was for the best. This guy was ruthless but had a proven record of releasing great varieties to the market...

Is YOUR Brain Made of Plastic or Concrete? [Start Your Week]

Dr. Dennis Charney, a researcher and expert in neurobiology and the treatment of mood and anxiety disorders at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York said, “The Brain is Plastic, the more you use it, the better it gets. The more you use it, the better it functions. And the secret to maximizing your brain’s function and improving its performance is to use it. You need to utilize the plasticity of your brain by giving it practice. 

When I joined our local volunteer fire department, I knew nothing about fighting fires. They trained two nights a month, but when you’re starting at zero like I was, that isn’t enough. In the first three months, I went on several major fire calls that included a 3-story group home, a large grocery store and several house fires, all total losses. That summer, because I was new, I was sent to State Fire School, the only one out of the 25 firemen on our department who was sent to State school. I just figured all of the other firemen had done plenty of practicing and had their brains stretched enough to know everything they needed to know about how to fight fires. But I was wrong. Many of those brains were actually concrete and hadn’t been stretched in years.

What I learned during the three days at State Fire School really stretched my brain...