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Anna Cardoze, vice president of strategic accounts at Growers, shares how ag retailers’ approach to growing customer loyalty has changed alongside the technology available to make the programs perform. She also gives insights on how every ag retail business is nuanced and which may have low hanging fruit to build their businesses bigger with customers.
What are you seeing as you work with retailers on bringing in new tools to their business?
As a whole, ag tech has gotten so much better. We are hitting the road map, we are listening to the ag retailers and hearing what they need but also challenging them.
Also, there’s this shift in the market of “let’s collaborate and work together.” And that’s where there’s some magic that can happen — people remaining focused in their disciplines and then collaborating to bring the best experience to the ag retailer, so it’s not so painful for them to implement technology.
What are you finding most commonly in a tech audit?
We ask a slew of questions. We just want to understand the lay of the land. Because when we look at a loyalty program, we touch all aspects of the business. What I’m finding most often, though, is you could have the same ERP, and you could use it 15 different ways. Because ag is so nuanced, and every retailer does have different challenges, customers, opportunities, even if they’re selling the same inputs. At the end of the day, their challenges, their business is totally different, and so how they use their technologies is totally different.
Another constant theme is certain categories where retailers have low-hanging fruit. Grain is one of those great examples. A lot of these retailers have a ton of grain-only customers, and those customers are the lowest-hanging fruit, but there hasn’t been a reason for them to consolidate their business. So, we need to give customers that extra carrot to really think about consolidating their business.
What problem is Growers trying to solve?
When we think about the ag industry, it’s obviously very relationship-driven, and I don’t think that will ever change, but there’s a challenge where there’s been this little bit of “spread the wealth” mentality. They haven’t had that reason to bring it all together. And so, we really look at, how do we solve the problem of customer loyalty, where it’s not challenging for the ag retailer to track it, because they’ve got enough on their plate. How do we make sure that those dollars stay in the system without going outside to other entities where the retailer still has influence over those dollars. And then how do we design it so that it meets and kind of reverse engineers the retailer’s strategic objectives and then, as a cherry on top, bringing manufacturers in so they are building loyalty with the ag retailer and farmer, not through the ag retailer to the farmer.
