It’s beyond a traditional understanding of point, click, buy e-commerce. Co-founder and CEO of AgVend Alexander Reichert shares how ag retailers are looking to digitally enable not just the customer experience, but also have best in class tools for their sales teams, their marketing teams, finance, procurement operations, and helping their organization, do their best work with technology. He shares more on The Scoop podcast:
Here’s an overview of the conversation:
What has changed about ag retail’s approach to online commerce?
“When we first started AgVend back in 2017, we were ruthlessly focused on digital commerce in the space. There was a lot of talk around e-commerce, and this point, click Buy traditional e-commerce type of mentality. Retailers wanted to experiment in this space, and so our marketplace enabled them to do it where they would post excess inventory, we would do the digital marketing to acquire growers. Growers would make purchases on the AgVend marketplace, and then we would connect them with the retailer to deliver the product. We ran that for two years and sunsetted it in 2020 to evolve into our current model.”
What’s your footprint today?
“The industry really heeded the call for the challenge and stepped up to it and invested in enabling their businesses with technology. We’re proud that 28% of North American ag retail look to us to help them do that–digitally enable not just the customer experience, but also provide best in class tools for their sales, marketing, finance, and procurement to help their teams do their best work with technology.
What are the most common pain points that ag retailers encounter digitizing?
The most common refrain we hear from our partners is, ‘I wish I had done this sooner,’ and that goes to even just launching the platform. You can think through every last detail of how a grower would want to do business, and you can configure your AgVend platform in order to enable that. But oftentimes what happens is you push them, and then the growers come up with a whole list of other things that they want that weren’t even on your radar.
The No. 1 lesson, and we took this from the marketplace days as part of our evolution, it’s part of what we help retailers with in their digital journey. It’s not about point click buy E commerce. We think about adding something to cart and checking out and paying for it right there. And the industry is much more of a consultative sale. Thus, the decision making process isn’t on an impulse. It’s more about growers logging in and starting a digital journey. Their first step is just to view invoices, or the cash bids. And then from there, they take action. That can be as simple as approving a field plan or sending a message to their agronomist or the grain merchandiser. You watch the adoption of the platform for the grower, and they kind of move along this journey–from viewing their profile, gaining more satisfaction and then realizing the value in digitally engaging.
What are average adoption rates?
Our average adoption rate, and this includes retailers who have just gone live and retailers who have been with us for four years, is 46%. To put that in a little additional context, right out of the gate, you’re probably seeing about 35 to 40% of your customers adopt this tool. Then, it scales up over time, and for some of our longest standing partners, they’re well over 60% of their growers are actively engaging logging in taking some action on at least a monthly basis. We realized that 46% was actually represented by over 70% of the partners’ business. So that segment of customers was a much bigger segment in terms of how much business they do with the retailer. Your customers with a digitally enabled relationship typically are the retailer’s top customers, and so that just reinforces the investment that our partners are making because they’re able to serve the best and the biggest customers in a digital fashion.
How will artificial intelligence come to life within the ag retail business?
It will be augmenting how humans do their best work, and as we’ve already done digital augmentation is really what we’re all about. But something we noticed early on, is that the relationship is and will remain key. We see this across the different cohorts of growers out there; they still strongly value the relationship they have with their retailer, and so that’s not going to be replaced by a machine anytime soon. But we do see a world where that sales agronomist is empowered through AI to do their best work.
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