How to sell your stuff

Successful Farming's marketing team lines up in Kansas City

While attending the annual meeting of agri-marketing professionals in Kansas City last week, I ran into a fellow, let’s say his name was Gordon, whom I thought I’d never see again. I knew Gordon in another life, back when he was a successful sales executive, but also knew him as someone who’d been fired a couple times and bounced around a bit in his profession.

My first thought upon shaking Gordon’s hand, was that, wow, how can he keep up that smile and firm handshake? And, he actually seems genuinely interested in talking with me. If he were selling me something, I might be buying.

Marketers must have something special to stay in a tough game, it dawned on me. So I started asking some of the marketing pros at this meeting, “What does it take to be a good marketer?”

After all, don’t most farmers have something to sell besides the commodities they produce? Maybe you sell seed, club calves, or custom field work. Or perhaps you’re selling yourself to landowners.

In about a half dozen interviews, here’s what I learned, mostly pretty basic stuff, but perhaps something to keep in mind next time you’re pitching your customers, banker, neighbor, or landlord.

Understand your customers. “This means listening, and asking why should they care,” said one marketer. I get this. One’s first impulse is what’s in this for me, rather than for the customer.

Be willing to change. “It’s easy to be offended if people don’t like your product or idea,” an advertising agency executive said. “You have to be adaptable.”

Be social and outgoing. Unless you’re a guy like Gordon for whom this comes naturally, you may have to really work at this one. But, unless you put yourself out there, how are you going get your message across? You wouldn’t believe how much networking goes on at an agri-marketing conference.

Be a quick communicator. Kristi Moss, Paulsen Marketing, gave me this thought: “You need to make your message clear and succinct.” Nobody wants a long, boring story about your product or service. Marketers have taught me you should be able to give your message in an “elevator speech”—something you can boil down and tell someone in the time it takes to go from one floor to another.

Use your intuition. Some people have an innate ability to figure out what’s really needed by their customers. “You need to link what is being sold with what is being sought,” said Paulsen’s Greg Guse. To me, this means trusting your basic instincts—what do you know best about machinery, livestock, land, and other farm matters?

I doubt Gordon thinks about all these things when he’s talking with a prospective customer. He listens to you, remembers your name, and tells a good story. He has that innate ability; selling comes naturally to him. Most of us have to work at it.

Mailing it in

Photo courtesy of U.S. Postal Service

What’s your snail mail like these days? Yesterday, I received four items that went something like this:

• My university alumni association is offering some sort of financial analysis for retirement. There was a small fee, I believe, and a bank involved.
• A cell phone data service is presenting an invoice for commodity marketing services that were initially offered for free. It’s entirely unclear whether I’m being billed for future or past services. The confusion seems intentional.
• A magazine is automatically renewing my subscription, which doesn’t expire until July. Unless I go to the effort of contacting the publisher, I will keep paying.
• A legal firm is offering to enroll me in a class action suit against several manufacturers of lawnmowers. The suit claims that the defendants overstated the power of the engine on the machine I bought last summer.

Is there not a common thread in all of these mailings?

The university is getting into a business outside of its mission. The data service is trying to confuse me as to whether I owe them or not. The magazine is making it inconvenient for me to end my subscription (even though that’s not my aim). And the class action group is trying to involve me in a frivolous legal action that could net me $35 some day.

I remember when waiting for the mail was pleasant part of the day's drama. But, that was back when everyone wrote cards and letters instead of e-mail.

A trip to the mailbox used to be one of the great joys of daily life. At the farm, a quarter-mile stroll to the main road was filled with anticipation, and gratification coming back, as we sorted through our new magazines and letters from family and friends. Even the junk mail seemed entertaining.

Of course, e-mail can be awful for its miasma of dirty deals, false advertising, and confounding wordiness. But, you better watch out for the U.S. mail.

The Masters as pasture

Will Augusta National look as lovely as our Nebraska pasture?

My dad and I are getting set to pay a visit to the Masters golf tournament this week, an event that seems almost as well known for its setting as for the championship golf itself. For dad, who turns 85 this summer, this is a "bucket list" deal; we're looking forward to the drama of seeing the world's greatest golfers compete for the green jacket.

Of course, the Masters spotlight this year is shining on Tiger Woods. But, I'm as much interested in seeing what the ethereal grounds of Augusta National look like close up.

How can a place engineered to be so beautiful for golf and television be created from the same stuff as any old pasture—soil, water and grass?

The thousands of fans trampling the turf and golfers punching out divots must put the same sort of pressure on the resource as does a tightly packed beef herd mob grazing through paddocks, no?

I’ve had the same kind of question about how tennis at Wimbledon can be played on grass for two weeks steady, or how football games can be grinded out on on frozen turf in late autumn. And how do they keep those perfect patterns mowed on outfield grass in major league ball parks through the dog days of summer?

Augusta National is in a class of its own, though: The carefully tended dogwood, the azaleas, and pines frame perfectly coiffed fairways, shining white sand traps, vibrant greens and magical flows of water. Adding to the atmosphere are the legendary names of the natural features--the Eisenhower Tree, Rae's Creek, and Amen Corner....

Dad and I won’t be providing a lot of on-site coverage. Augusta’s environment is tightly controlled. Cameras and cell phones aren't allowed. You stay behind the ropes. There’s no running allowed.

A media contact in the golf course management trade press tells me that “everyone at Augusta is contractually prohibited from discussing anything connected with course maintenance or preparation of the course.” Steve Ethun, director of communications for the Masters, said this morning that "it's a tough week to line up an interview with the agronomics team." Understand. If Augusta were a farm, this would be harvest season with a winter storm rolling in.

So we don't expect to learn the secret formula of Augusta this week. But, Dad and I’ll be there taking in the sights Thursday and Friday, joining the crowd rambling around the ol' Georgia pasture. If you’re watching on TV, look for the two guys wearing Successful Farming caps.

Women in Ag get social

Farm women met first on the Web

The idea of "Tweetups," the face-to-face meetings of Twitter users, has gotten a lot of media attention in this new era of social networking.

What I realized this week, though, is that farm women probably can be credited with the original social meet-ups based on Internet relationships.

About a decade ago, a couple dozen farm women from all over the country, all of whom met on the Women in Ag discussion group, decided to get together. Successful Farming and Agriculture.com hosted the event at Living History Farms in West Des Moines.

I remember what a good feeling everybody seemed to get from matching faces with Web site usernames and spending a good part of the day together. The face-to-face meeting seemed to confirm for people that they had a lot in common, maybe even more than with their next-door neighbors. Their new neighbors lived in the next state or another time zone.

Last weekend, a few members of the same forum gathered at a restaurant, the Iowa Machine Shed, in Davenport, Iowa. The meet-up must have grown out of that same basic impulse to put a face to a name.

The idea cropped up on the forum back in January, says Sue Bertelsen, an Illinois farmer. There was not a lot of structure proposed for the session--just a time to talk.

“We simply talked about our husbands, kids, our jobs. We brought pictures of our families, pets, farms and houses,” Sue said.

“Sundae,” who drove 5 1/2 hours to attend, writes:

round trip...670 miles
gas & lunch... $95
meeting my friends face to face...priceless!"

We shouldn’t be surprised that farm women are social media innovators, says Rachel Happe, a Boston-based social media consultant. “Farming communities were the original social networks, as everyone needed each other,” she says. “My grandmother was one of the hubs.”

The Machine Shed type meet-up won't be the last, Women in Ag members say. Looks like there are plans for another gathering this spring or summer.

It’s interesting to see that these new farming communities can be based on a digital connection and still ring so true. “It's great to visit with true friends who know your life style and your problems and still be comfortable with it,” said Linda/IL.

Skin cancer: better under the light than the knife

I’ve just been instructed to stay inside the house for the next 48 hours to avoid any sunlight whatsoever. It seems only fitting, because it’s sunlight that's put me in this predicament. I’ve just come from a visit to a dermatologist, where I underwent my most recent form of treatment for skin cancer, actually in this case for potentially precancerous actinic keratoses.

The procedure, called photodynamic therapy, involved smearing my barnacle-encrusted head with an acid, then zapping it with a special blue light for 17 minutes. The process burned a little and made me a bit claustrophobic, but otherwise it was just another way to spend St. Paddy's Day. Side effects are skin redness, swelling and scaling, and can last up to four weeks.

During my time under the bright light this morning, the second of two treatments, I recalled the times I ran about the world uncovered by a hat or sunscreen. As kids, we used to think sunburn was some sort of red badge of honor. We swam, played ball, and rode horses with buzz cuts and bare chests. I just looked up a Successful Farming story on skin cancer and discovered that one blistering sunburn in childhood doubles your risk of contracting melanoma, the most lethal of skin cancers.

This isn’t the first time I’ve paid the price for having had too much sun in my history. I’ve had cancers, both basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas, scraped, burned, excised and radiated from my head, arm, and shoulder.

One time, as I watched a scalpel slice out a lesion along my temple, I was surprised to hear the surgeon mutter something like “it’s a serious treatment for a serious problem.”

This latest deal, the photodynamic therapy, is a way one might avoid the serious stuff again. Better, though, that I had learned earlier in life the recommended protections against skin cancer: protective clothing, sunglasses, and sunscreen. Seeing a dermatologist when you spot something suspicious is critical, too, of course.

As you might expect, farmers are at increased risk for skin cancer. Some research suggests that while farmers are well aware of the risk of skin cancer in their work, they tend not to use preventative measures—for the variety of reasons you can imagine. However, farmers are more likely to take health advice, including about skin cancer prevention and treatment, if it comes from people they trust, this same research shows.

So if you have someone's ear, then skin cancer is something you should talk about. It's a serious subject.

More information:

Farmer says it isn't smart to take skin cancer lightly
Mayo Clinic Skin cancer information
Levulan® Photodynamic Therapy (Levulan PDT)