Some people will know me from my time consulting and conducting market research in the ag market over the last 25+ years, writes Will Paterson*.
I originally worked for ICI – a big ag chem supplier in their day, then set up a reseller business in Gippsland for five years, worked for an animal health company in sales and marketing, prior to running my consulting business. These experiences gave me a good overview of the industry from several differing perspectives.
As a marketing consultant, I worked with numerous companies and had many conversations with sales and marketing personnel about the new products I had researched and what would be effective ways of training their clients and the frontline sellers who ultimately influenced the sale of their products.
Many expressed concerns that training, especially when conducted face-to-face, was often ineffective, expensive and it was always hard to measure the level of knowledge that had been transferred, understood, and retained!
Often, several key personnel were invited to one location, where training was conducted over a few hours. These people had to invest time to travel to the venue and sometimes could not attend as more pressing needs arose, leaving the trainer with just a handful of participants who were then tasked to carry the message on to their absent colleagues.
A telephone game would then ensue with distorted key brand messaging, diluted product benefits, ultimately resulting in a substandard experience for the customer.
These factors often made training frustrating, expensive, and always difficult to monitor effectiveness. Face-to-face training is extremely time-consuming for the trainer and doubtfully the best use of their time.
I had many discussions with industry leaders on how their product training and knowledge transfer could be made more cost-effective, comprehensive, and less time-consuming. To complement face-to-face training, progressive leaders can take advantage of existing software and have distribution staff and advisors conduct training online.
You can now add digital training via mobiles and tablets to improve reach, and gain continuity for the brand messaging you wish to convey to the market.
A few years ago, I was introduced to a digital retail sales enablement platform called Myagi that was being used industries like sports, outdoor, consumer electronics, and pets. All these markets have constantly-changing products and often require sales associates to have a good technical understanding of the products they sell.
On seeing how Myagi worked, I believed it had a lot to offer the ag industry, especially as all training and sales associate engagement can be easily done on mobile phones, tablets, or PCs and across multiple markets.
It means that you do not need to solely rely on face-to-face (f2f) training and software such as this can be used to both lower your training costs, and also strengthen relationships with the people on the ground who sell and influence the use of your products – building brand advocacy and in turn boosting sales.
The platform gives suppliers and distributors the ability to target training and knowledge transfer to the relevant personnel. So, if the topic relates to a specific crop, a geographic area, or even just one distributor, then you can get the right message to the right person and at the right time quickly.
With the recent challenging times, where travel and communication have been restricted, causing challenges to conducting f2f training, especially related to stewardship, compliance, and other issues that require oversight, the use of digital platforms can be extremely beneficial.
Having one component of your training conducted on mobiles and tablets will free up a lot of your salespeople’s time and enable training and knowledge transfer to a far wider range of people and allow for free-flowing and timely communication for all your go-to-market, brand training, and compliance needs.
By putting training content up on the platform, you can manage, track, and monitor communications, engage in direct conversations with sales staff, and track their learning progress.
Don't let 2022, or 2023 be another year of costly, inefficient, and unscalable training. There is simply a better way.
*Will Paterson has been working in and around the Australian ag industry for many and is always looking for new ways to do things. A wide range of experiences has given him the opportunity to work with many people across the industry and build strong relationships. Will can be contacted at will.paterson@myagi.com or 0407 563 241.
