JUNE 2017 SEEDWORLD.COM / 25 HOW LONG HAVE you been waiting for the opportunity to have the biggest sales increase your company has ever had? In my 40-plus years in this business, I’ve never seen a sales year like the one we’re about to enter. Three of the most opportun- istic “sales moons” have aligned perfectly. First, we have a price-driven market- place, which makes every company look just like its competition. Everyone is trying to sell their products at the cheapest price, with the belief that’s what attracts business when all it does is bore farmers. Only value attracts customers. Second, the competition is as weak as I’ve ever seen. During the past few years, companies have discovered which of their sales representatives can sell in this marketplace, and which ones can’t. What most found is that very few have the social skills needed to close the sale. Third, farmers look for companies that offer real value strategies to help them increase production — not just save money. Those who offer that kind of value will attract farmers, like honey attracts bears. If you’re wondering whether your sales representatives are prepared to take advantage of this opportunity, take a moment to answer the following: •  How are they going to get farmers to order before harvest this year, if they couldn’t do it last year? •  What are they going to say when the farmer says it’s too early to order, and he doesn’t know what he’s going to do yet? •  What are they going to say when the farmer objects to the price? •  How are they going to sell the varie- ties they need to sell and not just what the farmer wants to buy? Get Ready To Blow This Sales Year Wide Open ROD OSTHUS R.C. THOMAS COMPANY PRESIDENT @RodOsthus • rod@rcthomas.com • rcthomas.com Do you want the biggest sales increase your company has ever had? Get your people trained on how to sell seed to farmers, which requires spe- cialized training. Teach them what to say and how to say it to control the conver- sation and the sale. This year will be one of the easiest sales years for those who are trained. However, this year will be the greatest sales nightmare for those who aren’t. The time to choose the route you want to take is now. As Dr. Phil says, “The greatest predictor of future behavior is past behavior.” Don’t become a victim of what you know you could have prevented. Instead, blow this sales year wide open. IT’S NO LONGER a one-size-fits-all world for consumers as brands look to capitalize on the desire to portray individuality. The same can be said for the research world, which should no longer settle for a one- size-fits-all approach. Researchers and plant breeders work with different crops, in different plot sizes, and with different goals. Why should they settle for something that doesn’t entirely meet their needs. That’s were customiza- tion comes into play, and it’s something our business model is centered around. We build equipment to do exactly what you need. We talk with custom- ers to understand what they want to accomplish, and then we work together to develop the proper specifications. The machine is then built to those specs. That means we can build a planter with evenly-spaced rows, individual rows or a combinations of rows. If you want a four-row planter, we can space all four rows equally apart, or we can do groups of two, or some combination. We are building a planter now for a customer who wants the option of having all four rows the same width apart, doing two-by-two, and then having two paired in the middle. There’s another customer who wants to have operators on the planter feeding it, and another who wants to use pre- filled magazines. It’s one machine; it’s one planter. But it has two completely differ- ent styles of functionality. The ability to customize is important. There’s nothing worse than spending money on new equipment, and it not doing exactly what you want. And just because it’s customized doesn’t mean it’s more expensive than one that is stock produced. It might be counterintuitive, but our planters are generally priced at a lower point than those stock produced. There’s so much variety in research, and our manufacturing process takes that into Customization Is the Crux of Building Research Equipment TAMRA BOUCHER HALDRUP USA MANAGING DIRECTOR tamra.boucher@haldrup.net • haldrup.net account. What one customer is trying to accomplish is very different than another, and knowing you’ve got equipment that is going to help your research is much more desirable and valuable. Because we build it from the ground up, each piece is unique and matches the desires of a particular customer. From the time that all parties agree on the design specifications, it normally takes our team 90 days to build. We can work on tight timelines with only months, or we can work with much longer dates. Today, for budget and funding purposes, some researchers start planning their equip- ment purchase two years before they even have the funds available. Regardless, we are flexible in working with customer’s schedule and finding exactly what they are trying to accom- plish and pairing that with the right equipment build to meet their needs and objectives.