The Truth About Sales Professionals
This is scheduled to run in the Capital Press in April of 2006
I spend a good deal of my time advocating for farmers to move into a more active role in the sales of their products. I believe that one of the only ways for farmers to ensure the long-term viability of their operations is for them to become more vertically integrated: to either add value to their products or to create their own sales and distributions channels.
This is not easy work. I know this because I have done it for several years now. However, I have learned a few things about the process of producing and selling food that might help you when you go out into the often cruel world of sales.
Good sales professionals meet and interact with a wide array of diverse people. They try to find something memorable in everyone they meet and they work to remember people’s names. The true professionals build relationships with everybody they meet regardless of whether or not that person may be a viable prospect. The greatest sales professionals build wide and diverse networks of friends. They sincerely care about the people in their network. Salespeople who try to fake this are easy to spot and harder to stomach.
People who are generally miserable tend to take it out on strangers. Since good sales professionals meet lots of people, they are frequently abused. However, the great ones minister to the miserable. They understand that people act the way they do because they are either in a good or a bad place in their life. People who believe that unhappiness is an impermanent condition are generally positive, while those who believe that unhappiness is permanent, are generally miserable.
By ministering to the miserable, great sales professionals can actually affect positive change in the lives of those they touch. Sometimes, all that this requires is looking an unhappy person in the eye, sincerely asking them how they are doing, and listening to the response. Often, the resultant change in demeanor is nothing short of miraculous.
The greatest sales professionals are those who do the most homework and apply the least pressure. They often understand their customers better than their customers understand themselves. They follow the trends that affect their customers and are quick to find solutions to their customer’s problems regardless of whether or not they stand to make immediate gains. In the process, they extend their network to include other companies that provide the solutions to these problems.
In short, the greatest sales professionals truly care about their customers. They represent quality products and their innate talents, coupled with the quality of their products, make them indispensable to their customers. They possess integrity, empathy, courage, and tenacity. They understand that “No” simply means “Yes” with an unspecified set of conditions, and they realize that there is an audience for every product at every price point, however small it may be. They know that good deeds are always rewarded, that the reward is seldom immediate, and that the greatest rewards are frequently non-monetary.
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The Supermarket Conspiracy - Who stole the flavor from my orange?
This piece ran in the Capital Press on March 17, 2006
I found myself at a Bay Area food writer's dinner a few weeks ago delivering an impromptu speech on the paucity of flavor in the modern produce supply. Some of my colleagues opined that farmers have robbed our food supply of its flavor in the search for greater profits. Here follows an abbreviated version of my reply.
The lack of flavor in supermarket produce is not the fault of farmers, but rather of the purchasers, who determine the requisite attributes for the products that they buy. The movement away from flavor has it roots in the post-World War II industrialization of American agriculture, when American farmers were tasked with feeding much of the population of war-torn Europe.
Armed with a series of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that were developed as part of the war effort, farmers were able to increase their yields and to grow the surpluses required to feed the world. Around the same time, suburbs began to grow and spread. This new development necessitated the proliferation of supermarkets. All of these factors combined to set the stage for the consolidation of both the food supply and its distribution and sales channel.
Fast-forward to the present and you find it nearly impossible to find a good orange in the supermarket. They may look perfect, bright and free of mold, but they taste like little sacks of orange-flavored water. "I cold called (a major retail super market) recently," explains Chico, Ca. satsuma mandarin grower Jarald Davidson, "I happened to catch the buyer on the phone and he asked me why his citrus sales were declining. I asked him if he'd tasted his produce lately and he replied that he hadn't. I told him people weren't coming back to buy his citrus because it has no flavor."
In order to extend the shelf life of the product, the market has dictated that citrus growers pick their fruit early, before it is fully ripe. The fruit is then gassed with ethylene in order to ripen it. Thus, the stores are able to get what they want, ripe looking fruit that is as stable as under ripe fruit without having to incur the losses associated with the rate of spoilage of fruit that is actually ripe. "the fruit looks great," Davidson explains, but sinse it isn't actually tree ripened, it doesn't have the sugar and the acid to actually taste good.
Davidson explained this to the buyer to which the buyer replied “Wow, you are probably right.” However, armed with the truth, the buyer was still unwilling to discuss making any changes to his buying procedures. This is exactly why supermarket oranges have no flavor. It is more important to the purchasers to minimize loss, or shrinkage, due to over ripeness then it is for them to provide their customers with access to food that actually tastes good.
Food writers, even in the astute San Francisco Bay Area, are usually isolated from the reality of the distribution and sales channel because their task is to assess the final product rather than the means through which it came to be. However, once you explain something to them, they remember and they tell others. Perhaps the truth will bring flavor back to the supermarket.
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Farmers of America - Connect People To Their Food
This piece ran in the Capital Press on March 10, 2006
The conversation started simply enough. The young man at the drug store asked me, “Is it cold enough for you yet?” I was visiting my parents in Redding, Ca and, at 38 degrees Fahrenheit at 3PM, it was indeed cold enough for me. My reply took the conversation down a long, illuminating path for both the young drug store clerk and for me.
“It is cold enough from me but it is way too cold for the almond trees,” I replied off-handedly as I handed him my Snicker’s Almond bar. The young man’s ears perked up, “What happens to the almonds when it gets too cold,” he enquired.
“Well, two main things,” I stated, “the buds can freeze and the bees get too cold to do any work so they stay in their hives.”
The young man laughed with amazement, pointing to the candy bar, “You mean it takes bees to make that candy bar, who knew?”
Twenty minutes later, I left the store after engaging in a deep conversation with the young man about how almonds are grown. He was a keen listener and sharply inquisitive to boot. His parents were both professionals and he grew up detached from both the land and the production of food. “I never knew that bees had a real purpose in making food,” he confessed, “I guess somebody probably told me at some point in time but I mustn’t have paid attention.” He was enthusiastic about learning as well, “you should write a book about what it takes to make all of the ingredients in a meal,” he urged me insistently.
The truth of the matter is, most people grow up totally disconnected from agriculture. As people involved in the production of food and fiber, it is easy for us to forget that we make up less than 2% of our nation’s population. However, most people have never or will never meet a farmer. As a result, any sort of encounter with a farmer will be memorable one for the general public. Thus, the time that you invest in interacting with the public will be both educational for you and the public, and beneficial to agriculture.
Our culture, with its strong emphasis on technology, is becoming more disconnected by the minute. Tools like the Internet and the cellular phone (with its bizarre wireless Bluetooth headset) that are meant to connect people often alienate us from our physical communities. Entertainment devices like the television, video game consoles, and the iPod (with its ominous and ubiquitous white headphones) provide us with fun ways to checkout of our physical reality. Finally, the automobile has made long commutes to work possible, which has cut into the time that we used to have to prepare meals and to eat together.
Everybody has to eat and people want to be connected to something meaningful. The signs are pointing in one direction; now is a great time for farmers to interact with the public. By sharing information you will learn.
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