Case Study
Virtual Sales Forces
In a crowded crop protection landscape with stagnant production acres, creating and addressing needs is crucial. The client's rapidly expanding portfolio increased salesforce responsibilities.
To enhance customer reach and ensure consistent contact with key retailers, a virtual sales program was developed.
The Challenges
- Extend the reach and frequency of the client’s limited sales force.
- Strengthen the relationship between the client, the client sales representatives and retail customers utilizing a virtual sales-support team.
The Goal
The goal of this program was to assist the client's sales force by providing virtual "boots on the ground" to conduct customer calls that would build awareness of and demonstrate the need for the client’s product portfolio.
- Regionalize the program with one part-time Associate in each of the five sales regions.
- Contract Associates for 50 hours per month.
- Select Associates based on crop protection sales experience, agronomic background, and regional agriculture knowledge.
- Equip each Associate with a client laptop, email address, and CRM database access.
- Provide five region-specific AgCall TeleSpecialists with crop and agronomic expertise.
- Appoint a dedicated AgCall project manager for coordinated leadership, ensuring workload distribution throughout the year.
- Selected Associates boast an average of 35 years in crop protection sales, showcasing adaptability.
- Originally phone-based, the program evolved with added capabilities like CRM email blasts, event management, tradeshow support, and CRM maintenance.
Annually, this team completed ~10,000 calls or emails across more than 150 campaigns and more than 20 client brands. Associates weren’t tasked with asking for the order, which made it difficult to attribute sales directly to the efforts of the team. However, the feedback from the sales force was consistent – the calls made a difference and retailers did cite those discussions when placing orders.
As an example, a 2013 campaign involving 226 retail customers was tracked for measurement. EDI for these customers was compared against retailers in these areas that did not receive a call. The impact was an average $18,000 increase per retailer contacted during this program.
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