The team at Telus Agriculture is advocating ag retailers consider how to streamline in-season scouting to improve customer relations.
Zach Worden, Regional Sales Manager, Telus Agriculture, says he’s seen how ag retail teams organize field data and agronomic information to provide two key advantages:
- increase communications within ag retail teams
- provide transparent and relevant support for recommendations to their customers
“If you had a system that put information in the salesperson’s hands, simplified workflows, and scaled to service customers and grow more customers, you can take a $3 million salesman and make them a $5 million salesman,” he says.
Key to this progress is reducing the “single point solutions” in the information collection workflow.
“One-point solutions break down your work flow. You need to focus on doing things once. With total connectivity, agronomic solutions connect with work order tasking, ERP, order management, carbon tracking, rebate management and your application equipment,” Worden says.
For example, he shares this time of year is a busy data collection time which coincides with a high-demand for agronomic recommendations.
“Retailers have to be enabled to generate prescriptions quickly and apply product only where it’s needed,” he says. “Advisers should be able to easily show how they are attacking an agronomic issue exactly where they need to attack it.”
Worden says technology is key in providing growers insights from data—not just data for the sake of data.
“When growers receive information, if they are given it once in a format they like, that’s how they always want to receive it,” Worden says. “We have the historic data to show problems over time, and layer that with scouting information in real-time. It’s a powerful tool to articulate the value brought by an agronomic adviser and prove ROI to the grower.”
With the current supply chain issues, Worden has seen how technology has helped with crop planning and pivoting to another option quickly when the first option was not available as expected.
“In the last three years, we’ve had a digital transformation in ag retail to use more precision ag. This includes the consolidation of the Telus ag companies into one dev stack—which has trampolined us into the future,” he says.
He adds, “The opportunity here is that we can push and pull data wherever it needs to go and everything rolls up into one dashboard. This means we can evaluate current condition, look back historically, and mitigate the risks of things going poorly.”
