- October 17, 2022
How to Get the Most Out of Your Teams and Technology with Effective Change Management
Technology is only as successful as teams make it. Find out how three retailers maximize their technology investments through better change management principles that increase adoption for both sales teams and growers.
Panel participants include:
- Shane Thomas, Agribusiness Analyst and Consultant, Upstream Ag Insights
- KC Graner, Senior Vice President at Central Farm Services
- Neal Horrom, Chief Operating Officer at Mercer Landmark
- Drew Garretson, Chief Marketing Officer at Ceres Solutions Cooperative
This panel discussion occurred during AgVend’s 2022 Partner Summit. The transcript has been edited for readability.
Change management is a superpower. If you can successfully implement change, that’s something that significantly differentiates any business, whether you’re talking technology, an operations process, or in your fleet management process.
Look forward to hearing about how AgVend implementation with these individuals has gone as well as other technologies or other new changes they’ve implemented.
In this discussion, there are different levels of adoption of the AgVend platform. Some partners are already live and active with the platform, some are in the onboarding process, and some are deciding if AgVend is a good fit for their organization.
What company do you represent and what does your company specialize in?
Drew Garretson, Chief Marketing Officer at Ceres Solutions Cooperative
Drew Garretson, Ceres Solutions. We’re a regional cooperative based out of West Central Indiana and cover about 550 miles from southwest Indiana to northern Michigan. We are primarily in the agronomy and energy business and we do some feed business. We currently bring in about $1,000,000,000 worth of revenue between all of our operations.
KC Graner, Senior Vice President at Central Farm Services
KC Graner, Senior Vice President of Agronomy at Central Farm Service. We’re a Full-Service AG Retail Cooperative, across southern Minnesota and into northern Iowa. We also have some feed business in South Dakota.This year will be about $1,000,000,000 revenue cooperative.
Neal Horrom, Chief Operating Officer at Mercer Landmark
Neal Horrom, Mercer Landmark. Mercer Landmark is a farmer owned cooperative in northwest Ohio. We have a pretty significant feed business as well as energy, grain, agronomy and a logistics business unit.
I just want to thank AgVend for putting this conference on. It’s great that we bring together like minded people to learn and collaborate. I think this is where we take steps forward and solve problems.
When you think about how your team handles change, how do you go about implementing that change when rolling out a new solution? What’s the starting point when you begin to think about change management and implementation?
Neal Horrom, Chief Operating Officer at Mercer Landmark
It starts before you select the solution. I’ve always tried to get my team involved in that process. We’ve identified a pain point, a need or a certain type of experience that we want to create for our employees, our customers, or to solve a problem internally. And we think that technology or a process change has a fit for that.
I usually start off trying to get the people that are as close to that problem involved in the process of solving the problem. I think that goes a long way down the road when you do get ready to implement a solution that you’ve got people that believe in it, people that are probably influencers in your organization and that can carry the ball forward when you get ready to launch something.
KC Graner, Senior Vice President at Central Farm Services
What’s the problem we’re going to solve is always step one. As with any journey, there’s a roadmap. What’s the itinerary? Where are we going? And what are the expectations? Just making sure that the whole road map is understood by everyone and from an expectation level, what are we going to be holding everyone accountable to?
From leadership, to everyone executing it on their level, we make sure that we’re delivering on the promises that we set out in that roadmap.
Drew Garretson, Chief Marketing Officer at Ceres Solutions Cooperative
It really comes down to our strategic initiatives. We’ve spent a lot of time and effort every year on developing the things that our organization is going to focus on both internally and with our customers.
I’d say that every decision we make ultimately comes back to those three or four strategic initiatives. And if they’re not solving for one of those things, that’s not important. Let’s make sure that we have them lined up to what’s important. And we’ll talk about this a couple of different times but for our organization, it’s really important that our team understands why we’re doing what we’re doing.
We tend to be really good at execution, tend to be really good at what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it. But sometimes we miss the why. When coming back to Ceres, every time we’re in front of our team and helping them through this level of change, we start with the why.
How do you implement incentives and how do you actually engage staff in a more meaningful way?
Drew Garretson, Chief Marketing Officer at Ceres Solutions Cooperative
One of the advantages is that we haven’t launched yet. We’re really close to getting it off the ground. But I’ve learned a lot by just listening and asking a lot of questions on what we’ve learned and what you guys have learned. It’s been very beneficial to me.
I would say that incentives drive behavior in our organization. We think about it in two buckets. We have to make it more convenient for our customers to do business with us. And we had to make it easy for our sales team. We have had to be more efficient with the resources that are slim and we’ve got to make sure that we utilize them to their full capabilities.
KC Graner, Senior Vice President at Central Farm Services
We are about two years live on the portal with our team. I’m not sure that we did it perfectly as we rolled out but we put our best foot forward with it. I’m trying to get people excited about logging in.
From an incentive standpoint we did a 12 Days of Christmas campaign because we went live at Christmas time. What a great way to get our customers to log in by sending them ,12 days in a row, an offer. The first day was a free Carhartt jacket and that cost us about $15,000. We started with the big incentive and picked off the low hanging fruit right away.
It quickly became apparent that all those early adopters were bought in and they’re using it. Now we need the bulk of our business. We worked well with our partnership manager at AgVend on what are the three things every business quarter we want to accomplish, to get back to that road map. Then, whichever one of the teams within our business would achieve that benchmark, would get a little incentive. We were giving $100 gift cards to those subregional teams of salespeople and truly just not trying to eat the whole elephant at once.
Figure out where the benchmarks are. Reward those that hit them first.
Neal Horrom, Chief Operating Officer at Mercer Landmark
I just counted on everybody hating our statements and our invoices so much that they would just want to know how to sign up and be good to go. And we got some of that.
We’re at a point where we launched and we started with a small group and then did our general invitation across the board. We’ve segmented out certain groups of customers that represent a certain amount of our business that we want on the platform and engaged. We’re at that point where we’re going to push our teams to go out and walk those customers into the platform and the experience. It’s good to hear some of those suggestions but we haven’t done anything like that to this point.
What would you have done differently when it came to the roll out in the implementation? What stories or takeaways can you share?
KC Graner, Senior Vice President at Central Farm Services
I would have gone back in time and tried to promote the vindication of it from those early adopters who had that lightbulb moment the first time they used it.
We had never had a digital offering that went really well, it was always painful or we were waiting for it to break down, glitch, or create a customer service nightmare because we shared the wrong information. That’s where we were. Now hindsight being 2020, I do have 100% confidence.
Take some of those people that had those early experiences, get them worked up, and share that experience through intercompany communications, “I just used this feature of the portal and here’s how much easier it made my life.”
Once we started doing that, we noticed more growers logging in because our sellers were taking their phone and doing it for them. And we noticed a lot more adoption internally just because it’s a pretty flattering thing to steal someone else’s idea. Salespeople are competitive. And so we feasted on that.
Take some of those people that had those early experiences, get them worked up, and share that experience through intercompany communications, “I just used this feature of the portal and here’s how much easier it made my life.”
What are some of the apprehensions from the team or customers with adopting the AgVend Platform?
Drew Garretson, Chief Marketing Officer at Ceres Solutions Cooperative
We have a group of employees that are also customers and they’re vetting the tool through the month of September. We just kicked off last week. So we’ll see. But all indications are that everything seems to be accurate and a lot of positive feedback on the experience. We really owe it to our customers and our internal team to really elevate our customer experience.
It’s been hard to do business with the retail channel. We’re constrained by technology or we’re constrained by not being willing to change or be agile enough to do those things.
I just did the quick math. We have 750 full time employees. I looked at their birth dates and made the assumption that if you were born after 1990, I’m going to call you a digital native. You are comfortable with using the Internet to help you. Today we have 20% of our workforce that was born after the year 1990. So 80% of them are digital immigrants, meaning they’ve had to figure out how to use technology. And I’m just going to say that 25% of them are unwilling. But if you just fast forward the clock and you say with the turn of employees by 2030, we’re going to triple the number of people in our organization that will be born after the year 1990.
We owe it to the future of the organization to make sure that we invest in experiences like this. And our customers will be very similar to that. So I think that’s the reason for this entire thing.
We owe it to the future of the organization to make sure we invest in experiences like this.
Do you have any insights to get those who are unwilling to open up to adopting to help support them?
Drew Garretson, Chief Marketing Officer at Ceres Solutions Cooperative
We have very few success stories, to be honest with you. I would say that this is a change management principle that I live by – we have got to make your life easier. So we’ve been pretty consistent in our ways.
We haven’t always been that confident in the rollout of technologies at the cooperative level, they haven’t all gone well. So our confidence is shaken enough to where we may be stalling out on that because it hasn’t made their life easier to this point.
Neal Horrom, Chief Operating Officer at Mercer Landmark
I’ve always lived by this principle that I don’t want to get out in front of my sales team with anything that I’m delivering to the customer. I’ve always tried to be very careful that they are aware and know what we’re going to roll out and present to their customers from the smallest thing to something as big as the customer portal.
There’s a balance of not getting out in front of your team, but your customers will also help pull your team to adopt. There are those people on your team that are not interested, not going to be an early adopter, or they’re not going to embrace this technology or this new process for themselves. But if their customer is going to benefit from that then most of the time that overrules their own personal feelings of whether or not they’re going to invest in learning how to use this technology or making the change.
You have to know your team and your customers. Sometimes, you can generate that pull through and adoption on your team with those people that you aren’t expecting by using their customers to kind of pull them through. That’s a reverse adoption to generate that interest from a different perspective.
How do you allow the best ideas to come forward regardless of the person’s position in your company?
KC Graner, Senior Vice President at Central Farm Services
We were lucky that our cooperative had the chance to make a lot of other changes prior to the digital change that we’re talking about here today, just with some integration of some locations and changing up the size of the team. We had gone through a merger six years ago and had to make some of those changes that come along with a merger.
One thing we tried to be very intentional about through that whole process was encouraging everyone that the best idea needs to win. Whether it came from myself, whether it’s three people or 30, everyone has the same equity in terms of bringing an idea forward. And the group has to decide in an unbiased fashion, what’s the best idea and why.
What I really learned was oftentimes the best ideas came from the people with the least amount of experience, because they had this ability to look at a situation in a more abstract manner, not unlike how we’ve approached some things with the AgVend Development Team.
Oftentimes the best ideas came from the people with the least amount of experience, because they had this ability to look at a situation in a more abstract manner, not unlike how we’ve approached some things with the AgVend Development Team.
Some of the questions that Eli has asked me over the years have made me think, he just had a better idea, and it took him 5 seconds to formulate it. But it’s because he’s learning it from a completely different perspective from what I’ve got, which has biases and preconceived notions and assumptions.
Just encourage everyone, whether you’re the CEO or whether you’re a mid-level manager or whether you’re the intern that can’t even tie your shoes, if it’s still the best idea, that must prevail.
Drew Garretson, Chief Marketing Officer at Ceres Solutions Cooperative
Be intentional about asking questions to the field and create a space for them to do so. On a quarterly basis, we have a group of influential people in all three verticals of our business together and we have an intentional questioning opportunity for them to roundtable group work things where we can throw those things up on the board, take the ideas from, and there’s an opportunity to provide feedback to the leadership team on what is it that we need to fix and how we go about fixing it.
I always had a rule that if you’re going to come to me and complain, you better come with a solution. One of the things in the cooperative space that we always have to continue to contend with (and it’s actually what brings a lot of value to our system) is that we are reverse owned.
We actually are owned by the farmer and their voice needs to be heard, too. We’re actually pulling together a group of forward thinking thought leaders. We said, who are the key farmers in our area that are going to be farming in the year 2040 and that we believe are those really progressive, left side of the curve, that we can learn from?
And we create opportunities to listen to them about where their business is going because we will intentionally react to where their business goes. That’s what the model of the cooperative is.
So I think, 1) create a space to listen to your field team and 2) don’t forget about your customers.
Neal Horrom, Chief Operating Officer at Mercer Landmark
Our CEO is fairly new to our organization. So we’re going through a cultural transformation to create and allow for innovation and to cultivate that. Part of that is getting people to understand that it’s safe to be able to have an idea and bring it to their manager or to the leadership of the company.
Then it’s up to us to put aside our own thoughts and opinions and go with it. The four pillars of our culture are to innovate, grow, develop and perform. When we talk about innovating, we talk about finding a better way to do something and then being able to iterate off of that. So if it fails, that’s fine. Just learn from it and make it better the next time. And I think establishing that and getting good at that is what we’re trying to do.
How do you allow the best ideas to come forward regardless of the person’s position in your company?
Neal Horrom, Chief Operating Officer at Mercer Landmark
I would say two of the biggest mistakes that I’ve made in the past were this idea that you have a great solution. You’ve got great technology, you’ve got a killer app and you’ve invested all the time and energy in developing it. You know what it will do. You know it will solve problems, but you don’t give the why to the team. You don’t have those influencers in your organization that are helping you drive adoption. And you just throw it over the fence.
So we’ve created some really good stuff in the past or picked up some really good tools and solutions. The early adopters, they pick it up, they run with it. But you wonder why you don’t get past 10% adoption. We got to 11% and were five or six years in.
Not doing all of the upfront work and expecting people to figure out how to make it pay for them is one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in the past.
KC Graner, Senior Vice President at Central Farm Services
I think just remembering from whatever initiative you are leading, that if someone isn’t following along with that, ultimately it’s on you. You have to have that extreme ownership if you haven’t done something in that change management sequence to not help this person see the light.
Once you’ve checked every box, then maybe it’s okay to write that person off. But ultimately, with any initiative, at least ones that I’ve faltered on, it’s been because I thought I had a beautiful recipe built and handed them the recipe and just didn’t give them all the ingredients to go with it.
It just comes back to recognizing whether it’s us as leaders or the other leaders we depend on to disseminate through the organization. Not taking the ownership of the change happening. It ultimately is on us.
Drew Garretson, Chief Marketing Officer at Ceres Solutions Cooperative
I started at Ceres over two years ago. When I first got there, I asked a lot of questions to the field team, to our senior leadership team and to our customers. I think I had a total of about 157 conversations, asking them a lot of questions about what they needed and what their expectations were of us.
There were five things that were pretty consistent in almost all of those conversations and one of them was clearly number one – we needed to be more operationally excellent.
So I started asking a lot of questions within the network of people that I knew around how they tackle these things. I was all fired up that we were going to implement this technology solution that was going to help us solve the world’s problems as it relates to operational efficiencies. But it just didn’t work.
The thing about that was partly on us because we didn’t implement the right change management practices and hold people accountable. Sometimes tech companies get scope creep and they start getting into shiny object syndrome too. They found something else that was super cool and they started focusing on that and not as much time on what we were hoping they would help us solve.
It’s tough to pick the right partners and you probably are not going to bat a thousand on that. But at the end of the day, that problem doesn’t go away, it still exists. And we had to figure out how to solve it and we get to go back up to bat to figure out how to solve that again.
When it comes to selecting the right partner, what are some of the things you’re looking for? What are some of the questions you’re asking?
Drew Garretson, Chief Marketing Officer at Ceres Solutions Cooperative
One of the things that we’ve proven and AgVend does an exceptionally good job of this, is surrounding yourself with really good people. If I was an ag tech startup today, one of the things I see them missing is the fact that they get so excited about their technology and they think their technology is going to solve all the problems and they forget about the customer service and what it really takes to support the ag retailers and farmers.
It takes people and kudos to Alexander and Eli for investing in some really good people here at AgVend because they’ve helped us on the journey for sure. If I was going to go back and do that over again, I would spend more time evaluating the people that we’re going to, that we were going to be working with.
KC Graner, Senior Vice President at Central Farm Services
We signed up to partner with AgVend based on the product we saw and the product line, which is a beautiful product. But the reality is that it’s been the people that we partner with, Partnership Manager Lena Head, standing in the back there, have to acknowledge her. We consider her part of our team. She comes to our internal sales meetings where all the secrets are discussed and in 100% transparent fashion, because we consider her part of our team.
That can’t be understated because we’re just so used to signing up for a digital offering or a software offering and they get you going. They back up and they wait for it to break and then you call them and then they service you. Whereas with an AgVend partnership, it’s an every week interaction. They push us more than we push ourselves, but it’s a togetherness that I had not yet experienced in the digital space.
With an AgVend partnership, it’s an every week interaction. They push us more than we push ourselves, but it’s a togetherness that I had not yet experienced in the digital space.
Neal Horrom, Chief Operating Officer at Mercer Landmark
Another thing for us was the culture of the organization. It ties to people, but understanding how they operate, their approach to working with their customers, and understanding their business.
Alexander sent us a couple of books when we decided that we were going to start partnering with AgVend and it really just reiterated what we were already feeling about their organization, and it really was the icing on the cake. We made the right decision here. We’re really aligned from a cultural standpoint, from an ownership leadership standpoint. And that’s made it very pleasing and it’s made the journey even during the rough times more bearable.
I never hear the team give excuses. If it’s the person who’s answering the help email or Lena, who also works with us or anybody else. I’ve never heard them give an excuse. They take ownership and, like a lot of people have already said, they deliver. And those things just are there. They’re not common, unfortunately. But it’s important to us.
I never hear the team give excuses. If it’s the person who’s answering the help email or Lena (our Partnership Manager), or anybody else. I’ve never heard them give an excuse. They take ownership and they deliver.
Was there anything we didn’t touch on when it comes to effectively implementing change?
KC Graner, Senior Vice President at Central Farm Services
We had just missed our first quarterly goal by a little bit. And then we missed another one the next quarter by a lot. We stopped and we looked at ourselves and said, what are we missing here?
It was our AgVend partners who reminded us – here was your goal and you missed it. What are we going to do different? We sat down in a room and said we need to find a way to measure the deficiency of the people that haven’t yet adopted this. And how do we get them the right resources to level them up? How do we help them self-identify in a certain bucket? Levels one through five.
Level one is I remember my login and I use it for this. Level five is I’m a super user and can try to displace Lena at her job. These levels are disseminated through the three sales managers to sit down with everyone and have them identify where they are truthfully. If they’re trying to identify higher, they’re just trying to impress you – put the phone in their hand, make them show you, and then let’s break this down into digestible pieces.
That to me was one of the single most impactful moments that I can look at now and recognize that was the AgVend team not taking no for an answer out of us.They put it back in front of me that you’re not leading this thing right. You need to adjust course and do this differently.
That to me was one of the single most impactful moments that I can look at now and recognize that was the AgVend team not taking no for an answer out of us.They put it back in front of me that you’re not leading this thing right. You need to adjust course and do this differently.
Drew Garretson, Chief Marketing Officer at Ceres Solutions Cooperative
I have a quick story on one of our best salesmen who actually had just experienced something that I think a lot of people in the room will be able to relate to.
He was going to call on a prospect, to a new customer that was not ours. He’d been on his third call. So he was really close to bringing in a lot of business over to us and the farmer asked the salesman, “how’s your monthly statement?”
He just looked at him and said “it is not good, but I tell you what” and he handed over the phone number of Gail at the office. He said call Gail and anytime you have a question on your bill, you just ask her. She’ll be able to decipher it and be able to tell you exactly what it is that you owe.
And at that moment, I realized our customer experience lies in the hands of how well Gail can interpret the bill. And that scared me, I’m not going to lie. My guess is, we do $1,000,000,000 in revenue and we have crappy statements. So can we digitize the process?
One of the things I’m most looking forward to now is how that salesman will be able to answer that question a lot differently than what he has before.
Neal Horrom, Chief Operating Officer at Mercer Landmark
Your organization needs to have a perspective on digital: digital customer, customer engagement, and customer experience.
It needs to be part of your brand identity and not just something that we’re doing on the side to solve the problem with statements. That’s a very legitimate problem to solve. But we throw a couple of people at it, it needs to be embraced by the leadership at the highest levels within the organization.
For us, our board is fully behind it, our CEO, all of our senior leadership. And they need to be on board and bought in and have ownership in it early in the process. Not as late adopters to the idea.
I’d encourage you to go back to whoever your direct leader is and start having that conversation because it will pay off when things get tough, or when it requires more investment or more energy or more time. When leadership doesn’t have ownership in it or believe in what we’re doing, it’ll just get deprioritized. And that’s probably the worst thing that can happen for your customers.
When it comes to these less tangible ROI’s, how do you go about engaging the senior leadership to get them bought in to invest hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to change and to involve technology and evolve customer experience?
Neal Horrom, Chief Operating Officer at Mercer Landmark
I started off at the first annual board planning session and I used that content from Alexander’s presentation and talked about omni channels and started at the basics for our board to understand what the expectations from our customers are. And as we moved down our roadmap our board were the first customers to sign up and use the portal.
Our board chair was the first person to make a payment on an invoice through the portal. And his comment was “it was Amazon-easy”. So we started off really good. Just having them involved and having them understand what we were doing at the very beginning went a long way. They’re some of our biggest fans right now.
How do you continue to move the change ahead if you kind of hit a wall? How do you move some of the KPIs ahead? How do you know when to pull back?
Drew Garretson, Chief Marketing Officer at Ceres Solutions Cooperative
I had somebody tell me once that they measure their life by complaints. If somebody is calling you and they’re complaining, it’s probably not good, but they’re not going to let you know when it’s going well.
If you’re not hearing anything, that’s probably a good indication that everything’s working pretty well.
KC Graner, Senior Vice President at Central Farm Services
It comes down to consistency and it comes down to communication, which drives so many things well beyond even a digital change.
We have an every other Tuesday morning call that’s scheduled with AgVend for a half hour. It’s a Zoom call. I open up that call somewhat prepared, somewhat unprepared, because things were going well and I haven’t had a complaint. And I assumed this is going to be around five minutes.
And those calls ended up going 45 or 50 minutes because we still had the different buckets that we knew we had to check in on every two weeks. I think if you’re good enough at scheduling that type of a cadence out and then making sure you’re covering all the bases every time, I don’t think you ever get to a point where you go, I’ve made a huge mistake.
What happens is you get to much smaller, more manageable points that we need a course addressed here. Here’s a personal problem or here’s a tech problem. At that point in time, you’re on the journey, which sometimes involves a flat tire or running low on gas, but you never get to that catastrophic point.
Neal Horrom, Chief Operating Officer at Mercer Landmark
We did something similar this year. We just opened a teams call. It was 30 minutes once a week. There was nothing prepared. It was for everybody in our agronomy operations team and it gave myself or some other leads on the call the opportunity to ask questions.
They could share some issues that they were having and see if somebody else was having that issue or how they were resolving it. So I think communication constantly and kind of monitoring those KPIs. Adjusting along the way, being able to have a platform that has some flexibility built into it and maybe a structure within your organization that allows you to flex a little bit and adjust and learn as you go.
How do you continue to move the change ahead if you kind of hit a wall? How do you move some of the KPIs ahead? How do you know when to pull back?
KC Graner, Senior Vice President at Central Farm Services
For us as a member owned cooperative, what’s going to have the biggest customer impact first from their experience and then also obviously impact for us are the two biggest driving factors. Although these days it feels like the employee pain point factor is much, much more important and almost a third.
Drew Garretson, Chief Marketing Officer at Ceres Solutions Cooperative
It has to be profitable or advantageous for our customers. That has to be the number one thing that we always pressure back to. Then how does it fit into the strategy? If it’s out of that, then it doesn’t make the priority and we roadmap these things out.
We consistently have a five year roadmap on where we’re going from a digital perspective. Five years out, from a technology perspective, it’s not that far away, but yet it is sometimes hard to actually lay out what we will be doing five years from now, but it’s a good exercise.
We tend to look back on our wins when we start to say,” is this something that we should be doing?” We just recently did this as we ended our fiscal year. Look at what we did get accomplished during the last 12 months because we accomplished a lot! We tend to celebrate that for about 5 minutes, but don’t forget to look back on those wins.
Neal Horrom, Chief Operating Officer at Mercer Landmark
Customer centric and what’s affecting your business. We have some processes that are just legacy processes that are not the best way of doing things that we need to change and make the experience better or to help our managers or our leadership make better decisions.
Some of those things don’t necessarily look like they affect the customer, but they do at some point. That drives maybe a little bit of an adjustment in that priority. The other thing is the bandwidth of your organization. You may have a high priority item, but it requires a lot of bandwidth from your team that you just don’t have available. You might have to adjust priorities based on that as well.
If you incentivize the grower to download and use the app, how did you continue to engage them and keep them interested in using the app after that?
KC Graner, Senior Vice President at Central Farm Services
Once we got past asking people to log in the first time, every other month or every little season, you go out and sell something, there was some sort of an incentive that was really easy to cover and make your money back on. We still kind of have something that goes out, but we’ve really tried to mature for their experience by driving the engagement factors between them and their agronomist and some of those pain points that we alleviated with them, just steering them towards that with educational material.
Neal Horrom, Chief Operating Officer at Mercer Landmark
We’re early into this, so I think a lot of that repeat engagement has been driven just by the product and the capabilities. Primarily, paying their invoices and seeing that purchase history and that type of thing. We’ll have to go in that direction to drive some of the adoption that we want with some of those key customers.
KC Graner, Senior Vice President at Central Farm Services
Make sure at the end of the year when everyone’s meeting with their tax guy, (this year is going to be a big deal for that), and make sure that the grower knows to pull out their phone and show their tax guy the app. We learned that one year. I wish we had learned that year one because pretty much every banker or tax person’s jaw hits the floor and goes, “Give me that. Wow.”
At the end of the year when everyone’s meeting with their tax guy, make sure that growers know to pull out their phone and show their tax guy the app. Pretty much every banker or tax person’s jaw hits the floor and goes, “Give me that. Wow.”
Shane Thomas, Agribusiness Analyst and Consultant, Upstream Ag Insights
The importance of accountability for staff, creating a safe place to ensure you get the best possible ideas to deliver best outcomes from change management. You know, starting with a vision and a why and really engaging staff I think is a really key one that these guys all brought up and getting buy-in at all levels.
