The road to success in business may not be a straight line, but every mile marker has a common touch point—the customer is at the center of the success.
“It’s easy to get distracted and forget to keep customers at the center of your business,” says Brad Oelmann, president of Farrell Growth Group. “But first, ensure your business has a coordinated customer experience.”
As such, Oelmann outlines the following questions to consider:
- Do you have a customer culture?
- Do you know how customers feel when they conduct business with you?
- Do you know your customers’ business plans?
- Do you know if you aren’t selling them in all the categories, and if you aren’t, why?
- How is your business using technology to enable your knowledge of customers?
Define Your Customer Culture
Anyone who touches a customer should be aligned.
He says remaining focused on customers is so important because of the concentration in the business. To illustrate this, his analysis shows across the Corn Belt at a single ag retail location fewer than 10 customers drive more than 80% of the business.
“So it’s not a monumental undertaking to understand the customer experience and wrap your arms around how you can analyze and improve your customer culture,” he says.
Two Questions Start The Conversation
As an exercise, he suggests ag retailers go over their product and service offerings, and ask customers how did they feel about each product or service. Then, ask if and how a purchase brought them value.
He says it’s critical to have your business’ activities tied to customer outcomes.
“If you are surprised when a farmer-customer expands their storage of fertilizer, chemicals or grain, shame on you for not having a deeper conversation about their use of capital and being surprised,” he says.
It’s time to transform your knowledge of the customer experience into something much more tangible and useful in your own business strategy.
Pop the balloon of the price fallacy
Oelmann says all too often ag retailers rely on anecdotal information about the customer experience. That becomes a trap and allows buyers to weaponize price versus value.
“Ag retailers need to have notes on the ‘why’,” Oelmann says. “Farmers may say price drives their input decision, but it’s not always the reason they aren’t buying in multiple categories from you. For customers that you know their business plan, there is a partnership with them, and I bet price doesn’t have the same weight when you are talking about the operations of those customers. With those relationships, there’s more value than the price of the product.”
Oelmann encourages retailers to see this as a journey. At the end of every season, give yourself a grade by asking customers about your performance. This identifies what areas could be improved and how to take out some curves in the road to success.
