Marketing Strategies: Good People

By Daniel W. Block
D.W. Block Associates

The key element of a successful agribusiness is people. A highly-motivated, hardworking and enthusiastic staff can overcome obstacles, and achieve objectives normally considered impossible. Ask managers what their single greatest need is and the majority would say "good people."

Where and how does one find these important folks who are the key to our marketing success?

First, we need to look at the whole people management process within our organizations. There are well-established principles to allow people to reach optimum performance.

• Make certain the tasks that you expect are realistic. Many outstanding employees have been demotivated when saddled with unachievable job expectations.
• Employees need to know what is expected of them. They need very clear descriptions of their job, and how the performance will be evaluated.
• They need to be shown how to do their job. This is called training. Don’t assume they know how to do what is expected of them; verify that they can do what you expect.
• Create a motivating environment for your people. They must want to do the job as you expect. This may mean providing a specific incentive, or just that sense of purpose created by being part of a tem aiming for a common goal.

The reason these principles must be mentioned in the context of finding people is that when clear job descriptions, training, and incentive programs are established where they didn’t exist before, managers wake up to find that the "good people" were already there. Top-performing employees are like the seed we produce and market. If we fail to water and simply nurture our people, they won’t germinate or produce, and we’ll swear we’ve bought bad seed.

Overcoming high turnover

A well-established agribusiness that marketed feed and seed to Midwestern and Western farmers and ranchers, was suffering from a high turnover of their field sales force. When confronted with the problem of employee desertion and delays in recruitment, management cried that there weren’t any "good" people to choose from.

With outside support, management examined their program. They found they had loose job descriptions, and the training program was fragmented and administered randomly. Exit interviews revealed that employees found management’s expectations inconsistent and varied, depending on the marketing "crisis" at the time. They didn’t feel they were given adequate training in new products and procedures. In short, they felt management didn’t appreciate them.

This company decided to start a training program based on job descriptions developed with the help of their sales force. The program took more than a year to complete and almost another year to work out the kinks. But, even before the program was completed, management began to notice that many salespeople were starting to perform better. Marginal performers were improving.

The sales manager finally remarked that the "good people" for which they were always searching already worked for them. He only regretted that they hadn’t taken action earlier to save the folks that had already left.

Finding the right people

There does came a time when we must look for new people for our organization. A good way in which to begin the search process is to develop a "shopping list" of characteristics and skills that a job requires.

After you have made this list, examine it to determine which skills you can train, and which characteristics the potential employee must bring to the job. This will lead you to the current issue in sales force recruiting today: "Should we hire older, more experienced people who have already been in the industry, or younger, inexperienced people right out of school?"

The answer is based partly on the ability of your organization to train new people. The head of recruiting for a Fortune 500 agribusiness recently told me that the didn’t care if someone came from the farm or the city, or had any product knowledge whatsoever. What was important to them were characteristics they could not train, like the new hire’s ability to learn, communicate, get along well with other people, and enthusiasm.

Employment agencies, often called "headhunters," can be good sources for new salespeople, if they are properly used. Some firms don’t like them because of the expense and the feeling that the agency will "sell" them someone they don’t really want. The fact is you don’t have to hire anyone you don’t want to.

A California-based feed company learned it is often cheaper to pay the agency fees than start their own recruiting. They found it was very time consuming to develop the necessary contacts, and in the end they couldn’t contact the people working for other firms as easily as an agency could.

Universities are easy places to develop relationships. The best source for the top graduates is not the campus placement office; it’s the professors within the specific department from which you would like to recruit. Take some ag management or crops professors out to lunch and they will become your people scouts.

Finally, the best way to find good people is to attract them by having a well-run firm. The really good companies don’t have much trouble finding good people because good people are always looking for good firms. Your firm’s reputation is visible and is a beacon for the kind of people you want.