Episode 401: Selling to Farmers: The Psychology Behind Rural Sales

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

00:00:43:23 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I’m Brynne Tillman, your host today, and I am excited to have St John Craner on the show today. St John is a seasoned expert in rural sales and marketing, with a rich background that includes training and consulting for Agora businesses. I can’t wait to find out more about that to help them enhance their sales processes and performance.

00:01:09:05 – (Brynne Tillman): As the managing director of Agrarian Rural Marketing, he has dedicated his career to addressing the unique challenges faced by rural sales teams. St John is also an accomplished podcaster and author, sharing invaluable insights into navigating the complexities of sales in the agribusiness sector. Today, he’s going to provide us with deep insights into the rural sales landscape and share strategies to drive success. And welcome to the show. 

00:01:41:05 – (St John Craner): Hey, Brynne. Day. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. 

00:01:46:05 – (Brynne Tillman): Great to be here, too. And you know, when we started, I knew from LinkedIn you were in New Zealand, but I heard a little bit of accents from different places. 

00:01:55:05 – (St John Craner): Yeah, I’m British by birth. Come off a farm in the UK. So an English farming family that made a beautiful, kiwi, as we call them. And, ended up completely on the other side of the world. So, yeah, it’s similar to the UK here, but less people, more rugby, more green, more beer. My kind of place.

00:02:15:05 – (Brynne Tillman): I love it. Yeah. So New Zealand is high on my bucket list someday.

00:02:20:26 – (St John Craner): Will you be welcome? Anytime you come through you, you make sure you say goodbye. And we’ll look after you. 

00:02:27:05 – (Brynne Tillman): Well, yeah, I will, I will make sure I do that for sure. Terrific. Well, before we jump into my questions for you today, we ask all of our guests the same question: What does making sales social mean to you?

00:02:40:10 – (St John Craner): Yeah. I mean, I think the word social for me means being human. And I think sales is actually, I think sometimes we’ve lost our way in sales. I had this conversation with Andy Poole, where we will, on his podcast, lose sight of the fact that we’re humans selling to humans. We’ve got all the AI, we’ve got the tech stack, and all these things.

00:02:59:22 – (St John Craner): Essentially, though, sales is a human condition and it’s a contact sport, and there’s a lot of psychology in that which we’re which we’re role for.

00:03:08:10 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s great, I love that. All right. So let’s jump in because I’m dying to understand this rural sales because it absolutely intrigues me. And you are I’ve I’ve interviewed hundreds and hundreds of sales and marketing professionals.

00:03:23:16 – (Brynne Tillman): You are the first rural sales professional to come into my world. So welcome. And tell me, what does that mean? And how did you land here? 

00:03:35:22 – (St John Craner): Yeah. Great question. So my farming background, I come from a farming family in the UK, so it made sense for me to circle around. I’ve done the corporate, I’ve done the Young Rubicam and the candidates, and I’ve done the corporate circuit.

00:03:46:23 – (St John Craner): And the reason I ended back in for me is because I really love the people, and they’re really good, honest folk with an honest craft. You, you know exactly where you stand and sit with them. And so they’re my tribe. And so that made sense. So the reason I do what I do is I see very hardworking men and women who are often supplementing the farm income with our farm income through a sales role.

00:04:09:07 – (St John Craner): They might be selling seed, fertilizer, genetics or agritech, all these things. And I saw them suffer and struggle a lot because they didn’t know how to sell. And so they’re my people. And when they’re your people, you look after them. So that’s why I do what I do. 

00:04:25:16 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I love that. So, you know, there are a lot of entrepreneurs who got into business because they’re really good at their business, but they didn’t know that they were going to be professional salespeople and professionals.

00:04:38:28 – (Brynne Tillman): And so how do you help a farmer get into the right mindset that he or she needs to be in to market and sell their company?

00:04:51:10 – (St John Craner): Now they give me this is my thought. When I’m talking about rural sales people. I’m talking about people that sell to farmers, not the farmers themselves. 

00:05:00:28 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh. 

00:05:03:10 – (St John Craner): I often forgive myself. Sometimes they are part time farmers, so it could be a husband or wife that is working off farm to provide a farm income, because farming is hard, right? You know, climatic, biological floods, rains, fires, all the things that are going on in the world. So when it comes to sales people, we are teaching them how the farm is brain buys.

00:05:27:23 – (St John Craner): Now, what’s really interesting, Brynne, is everyone says to me, oh, but you know, this isn’t relevant to me. Why? You got this guy from agriculture, from New Zealand talking about rural and farmers and selling to farmers? The sector you sell, it might be different. And you’ve done this thousands of tons of thousands of your good guests on your good podcast.

00:05:44:07 – (St John Craner): But the thing is, the sector might be different, but the psychology is exactly the same. So it doesn’t matter if you’re selling to and some of your listeners are telling me, oh, St John, there’s different personas and different psychometrics and dis profiles and egos and ours, and we’re not going to go down that rabbit Warren. I like to keep things simple, because I have a very simple mind and keep things to like 3 or 5 things. So

00:06:05:20 – (St John Craner): what I would say is when it comes to anyone that you’re selling tuber, it’s a farmer or its farmer, and I can’t pronounce my name much. My mother’s disgust. But pharmaceuticals or your medical or your real estate or land or automotive or SAS or tech or whatever it is, people don’t like being sold to, and farmers are some of the most oversold to markets because they are very, very, cash poor but very asset rich.

00:06:31:25 – (St John Craner): And they need a lot of things to run their businesses. So, I work with rural sales reps and rural sales managers to understand how you all received and perceived and to break the automatic guessing machine of that cynical and skeptical customer. So we can talk about farming, but we can talk about it reflecting across any sector in any psychology.

00:06:54:10- (St John Craner): Because again, the sector is different. Doesn’t matter. The psychology is the same.

00:06:57:28 – (Brynne Tillman): So yeah. So let’s talk about let’s go deeper into that. Tell me a little bit about what motivates the buyer. What is the psychology from a larger picture? And then how have you bridged that to rural areas? 

00:07:16:10 – (St John Craner): Let’s get into it. First you need to know about human beings. Is that not like being told what to do? A bit like my nine year old daughter. They don’t like being told what to do. You can double that, triple that, quadruple that to farmers, because everyone’s trying to tell them how to farm and how to manage their land and all these kinds of things. No one likes being sold to the professional terms psychologically, is reactance theory, and obviously it’s within the name.

00:07:37:20 – (St John Craner): We react badly. So Covid, no one really likes to be told what to do. And we won’t go down that rabbit one. But brynne when you’re what you guys are a bit more lax here in New Zealand, Australia and other parts. They were pretty stringent and our esteemed government said to us, don’t panic, buy. What did everyone go and do?

00:07:58:08 – (Brynne Tillman): Panic buy.

00:07:59:20 – (St John Craner): so because we don’t like to. 

00:08:01:08 – (Brynne Tillman): We were told the toilet paper here. 

00:08:03:20 – (St John Craner): Yeah, exactly. We can we’re going to load up, we’re going to load up the truck and we are going to come home and we’re going to look after our own and to hell with it. So, the worst thing you can do is actually sell to people. So don’t do things to people. We actually understand this concept of reactance theory. The second thing you need to understand about the,

00:08:18:23 – (St John Craner): buyers brain, regardless of the sector you’re selling, is if you, forcing yourself or trying to be overly aggressive and all those yucky things, you will trip more their amygdala, which is the back of their brain.

00:08:31:11 – (St John Craner): It’s what I affectionately call a back of the brain response. I could use more eloquent terms, but that’s the polite term. And it’s really important that we at least sell because otherwise we were going to trip while that amygdala which is this smoke detector and go oh gee, this brain lady or this engine guy, he just like everyone else.

00:08:50:17- (St John Craner): And the thing is, if you sell the same, you’ll be treated the same. Now, often the most important differentiator in today’s very competitive red ocean world, because there’s so many things out, there’s so much competition is actually the salesperson. So it’s really important to understand that they actually are the most important part of the sales process and how they’re coming across and how they’re being received.

00:09:14:06 – (St John Craner): So basically what I do is I actually teach through sales reps how to become Nonreaders.

00:09:17:28 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I love that. 

00:09:21:28 – (St John Craner): Yeah. There you go. So we know we know when we know because we’ve got really clever science. Now I don’t. I don’t actually have an MRI scanner here in my office because I’m not that kind of guy, but we know from science, when we say certain things, they go to different parts of the brain.

00:09:38:04 – (St John Craner): And so it’s really, really important that we tread very carefully. And we’re very non assumptive and we’re very safe in the way that we sell. Now I have another book that will be coming out shortly and it’s going to be called Serve to Sell. So what happens is

00:09:53:15 – (St John Craner): instead of selling, we should be serving. Because when you serve the best interests of a customer, whatever sector you sell to, you are going to make more sales. But when you serve your own best interests, you are going to tripwire the amygdala, the back of brain response, and they’re going to shut down. And when

00:10:13:16 – (St John Craner): someone shuts down branches, you know, when your lovely man Howard Stern or my own Michael Parkinson. Parky is a fiction. He called it the BBC. The customer is not going to open up to you. They’re not going to be vulnerable and they’re not going to tell you about all the things because they are in a dire threat, you know, response and, it’s very important people understand this. 

00:10:35:28 – (Brynne Tillman): Okay. So I love it. So, a friend of mine, actually the CEO of C, Sweet Network. Trisha Ben says all the time, stop shutting people 

00:10:46:16 – (St John Craner): real good. Yeah, 

00:10:48:28 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that because, yeah, 

00:10:50:16 – (St John Craner): I would, I would just say it’s very simple. Just start serving people. You know, we are so self centered on being very candid and absolutely generic statements. But, you know, salespeople generally, 90% of them are self-centered. And they say a dollar sign above someone’s head and they’re quite orientated. And the prospect can feel that subconsciously, subliminally.

00:11:09:15 – (St John Craner): And so your job is to work out when you meet someone for the first time, where are they at in their mind and meet them where they are at in their mind? So that’s what I talk about, the mind reading, and I was being a bit facetious and a bit cheeky there. 

00:11:22:28 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I love that. No, no. But I think the more you know and the more you can read the mind.Right? You can understand because you can predict. 

00:11:33:15 – (St John Craner): Yeah,

00:11:34:01 – (Brynne Tillman): It happens especially when you talk about it from a science perspective. So our company has 21 tenants and one of them is detached from what the prospect is worth to you and attached what you are worth to your prospect. 

00:11:50:15 – (St John Craner): I love this concept of detachment. It’s a real discipline of MIT because I’m always a work in progress myself. At the tender age of 50. Here you must detach yourself from the outcome and you must attach yourself to the process. If your cells fall down, your cell cycle is gone. You skipped a step. The process is there. Protect. You must attach yourself to the process. Detach yourself from the outcome. Because when you attach yourself and only invest the outcome, your customer feels it.

00:12:18:19 – (St John Craner): They sense it. So I’m not talking about the thinking brain, which is the front of the brain. I’m talking about the fear and feeling parts of our brain. And I think a lot of sales professionals don’t understand that. 

00:12:32:01 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s an awesome insight. I love that. So I want to talk a little bit about the pressure of pricing. Right. Like so, sales folks think it’s the price I’m not selling because I’m too high. I’m not selling because I’m not competitive enough. Talk to me about how you know what you do around training and helping people get out of the price mindset. 

00:13:02:19 – (St John Craner): Yeah. Look, what I want to do is I want to work hard so I can help you.

00:13:05:04 – (St John Craner): And I want to work out what success looks like, what the ideal outcome for you is like, what result you want, what experience you’ve had with previous businesses like mine. So we don’t talk about the price. If the customer wants to up the price, then we can pop that price. I don’t have time to teach you all the objection prevention we do in price, but it’s very, very easy stuff is tell me, you know, before we get to price because the worst thing I can do, Brant here is give you the right price, the wrong solution, because that would probably be the most expensive thing is we’ll get to price.

00:13:36:27 – (St John Craner): But before we do that, can you tell me why you’re potentially even looking at something like this now? Oh, that’s a great line. That’s a great line. Yeah. So we talked about 8700 of these kinds of things. And you only need about 4 or 5, maybe even three in a conversation because the sales made in the conversation, right.

00:13:54:22 – (St John Craner): And a good sales conversation is actually fueled by quality questions. And again, I’ll throw it in to your listeners here. If they’ve got closing, we’ll get to pricing. They’ve got closing problems. It’s not closing problems, it’s opening problems. 

00:14:10:01 – (Brynne Tillman): So what opening problems do you see?

00:14:11:27 – (St John Craner): Assumptive selling. 

00:14:14:01 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. 

00:14:15:27 – (St John Craner): yeah. So, you know, ultimately you when, when you and I say you and I talking and meeting you can feel safe with me and know that I generally am trying to understand your needs and whether I can qualify or be disqualified, whether I can help you or not.

00:14:28:20 – (St John Craner): My job is to serve you, not sell to you. And I need to understand if I can help you. I have a moral duty to help you. But if I can’t, I won’t. And I’ll point you on to someone else. That’s it. That’s what we call integrity as what we call being professional and exactly 100%. But when it comes to that, I’ll come back to your question about price, because one will add a lot of value for your listeners here.

00:14:47:27 – (St John Craner): Price will come up in the absence of value. Price is a signal of an absence of value. You haven’t established value in the conversation. Now, I’m not going to be simplistic in your it’s all value price because you can just Google that. What it is is the understanding, hey, bring great catch up. I really appreciate you making time.

00:15:08:16 – (St John Craner): Before we get into things, I’ve got my first question. If I don’t mind me asking, why are you potentially even looking at something like this now? Now, when I ask that question, Brian, I hope the listeners have written it down because it’s worth its weight in gold. It’s a very assumptive question. The question is actually, are you ready to buy now or not?

00:15:27:17 – (St John Craner): Now, if I asked you in that way, you’d have a better brain response. But when I ask you in my way, you have a middle of the brain response, which is you’re failing brain, which is where you feel safe, because the better brain is where you fear. And once you feel, you then think, because human beings are stealing machines that think, all right, so we’ve got Antonio.

00:15:47:27- (St John Craner): Can’t be certain. But the neuroscientist to thank for that. That’s not mine. I just understand all my stuff and try to cite out, because I’m not that clever. So, yeah, when it comes to price, it’s an absence of value. You just have to understand what people want and why they want it, and then work out if you can help them achieve it.

00:16:03:26 – (St John Craner): And, you know, I think I think that’s it. 

00:16:08:01 – (Brynne Tillman): I love and I just want to share, I believe the smartest people are the best curators of the smartest people. 

00:16:18:26 – (St John Craner): Yeah, I love that, I love that, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don’t really have any original ideas. I just synthesize and pay tribute. 

00:16:25:01 – (Brynne Tillman): You reframe them, you’re reframing it in a way that allows you to take down the walls.

00:16:34:08 – (St John Craner): Yeah. 

00:16:35:01 – (Brynne Tillman): Of a buyer. 

00:16:36:08 – (St John Craner): Yeah, exactly. 

00:16:38:01 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. 

00:16:39:08 – (St John Craner): Exactly. And when it comes to if you want to really kind of analyze one of your questions. But I think there’s another really important point to get across. If people are really struggling, understanding what sales is about actually has nothing to do with sales. Now, I’ll be really deliberate here.

00:16:53:27 – (St John Craner): I’m very contrarian in the way I think, because we’re very counterintuitive in the way that we train our rural guys. The first thing I say to them is the problem with sales is selling. The problem with sales is selling, because the more you try to sell, the less you will sell. Now it sells about this. It’s simply about helping your buyers make really good, accurate and informed decisions.

00:17:17:11- (St John Craner): That is. That is how we define sales. You’ve got to make your buyers make really good, accurate, informed decisions because a buyer is terrified of only one thing brand, and that is making a terrible and poor decision. And so selling actually has nothing to do with selling. It has everything to do with buying. Because unless someone buys something, you don’t make a sell

00:17:37:25 – (Brynne Tillman): and you start with, no one wants to be sold, but people do want to buy 

00:17:42:11- (St John Craner): or they love to buy. You know, Jeffrey Gilmore, you know, he says that, you know, people hate to be sold to, but they love to buy. And he’s 100% right. Jeffrey’s absolutely right. So what we have to do is understand why they want to buy and what their motives and what the pricing urgency of that is, because that’s where we qualify and then speed up a sales cycle. But that’s a story for another day. 

00:18:00:25 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. So I just want to touch on, given the increasing reliance in digital tools, how do rural companies leverage technology? Because the farmers aren’t on LinkedIn necessarily, or are they, where are they and how are you? How are the rural sales people getting to them? 

00:18:24:11 – (St John Craner): Yeah, I mean, I use a very sort of crop analogy, which is like a 3 or 5 legged stool. They have multiple channels. They might listen to their neighbor, they might read the rural press, some of them on Facebook, some of what I call the Intelligencer Alpha sit there on LinkedIn. And so what you have to do is you have to find out where they are. But really, most importantly, it’s understanding what their network is and influencing info training. The lovely thing about farming is you can find out a lot about a farmer very quickly by just going into their community or their district.

00:18:56:04 – (St John Craner): Everyone knows everyone, and if you’re driving farmers, they’re all looking over the fence at each other and looking at the passes and their paddocks and everyone knows what’s going on in this community. So it’s we work a little bit differently, but we’re not hayseeds leaning on a fence sort of playing simple. You know, Dad and Dave, we do use technology.

00:19:15:01 – (St John Craner): But I think the thing with farmers is they are very interested in there’s still the relationship selling. They want to see you with your eyes. I literally got off a call with Canada, as you know, before we were on this call, and they wanted to eyeball me. They want to have a cat. And ultimately they might even be flying me up there because they want me in the room.

00:19:34:25 – (St John Craner): So they have what I affectionately call the sniff test. It’s my character because they’re such remote people that I really need to understand people and they’re so incredibly cynical and skeptical. And I tell you what, their bond to the person way before they go on to the business. This is why the salesperson is the most important part of the sales process.

00:19:56:17 – (St John Craner): So to answer your question, long round about why we do use all the tools, but we also keep it pretty simple. And it is human to human people to people relationship to relationship. It’s pretty old school, but it hasn’t gone out of fashion so far. 

00:20:08:25 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I love that. I love that there’s so many more questions I’d love to ask you, but we are running up against the clock.

00:20:16:07 – (Brynne Tillman): So my last question is what question did I not ask you that I should have? 

00:20:23:17 – (St John Craner): That is such a good question. And I know you, very, very kind and gracious. Give me an advance. Why don’t you. Why don’t you ask me the question about what I used to think was not valid in cells? That is now.

00:20:41:12 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, St John. What do you see? 

00:20:46:17 – (St John Craner): Yeah, I see that. Yes. 

00:20:48:12 – (Brynne Tillman): I used to be invalid in cells that are now valid. 

00:20:52:17 – (St John Craner): I used to think that your clients couldn’t be your friends. and I think ultimately, I think, you know, I used to think that, actually, you got to keep your clients at arm’s length. What I’ve noticed now, more so, is that actually, it’s very, very important to stay very, very close to your customers.

00:21:13:04 – (St John Craner): They don’t need to be your pals at the bar on a Friday night, but ultimately, you must treat them like a friend and welcome them into your house like you would a family member. And I think the closeness and the intimacy in a, in a polite and obviously appropriate sense is the way to go. So, yeah, that’s one of the things I’ve changed my mind on the other thing I’ve changed my mind on is,

00:21:33:03 – (St John Craner): yeah, the whole concept of selling is actually sales. Trading, I think, is pretty, pretty thwarted these days. And it’s very much about being buyer centric and understanding the buyers’ brains. So I just sign off and say, because now we’re out of time, be a student of psychology, guys.

00:21:50:08 – (St John Craner): Get insatiably curious about humans. And probably the biggest lesson and gift I could leave you with guys and brains is to be more interested in the person in front of you than the product that you’re selling.

00:22:03:06 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that that should be on a t- shirt. So it has been an absolute pleasure. I thank you so much. How can people get in touch with you? 

00:22:15:08 – (St John Craner): Best way to get hold of me. I’m on LinkedIn. I think hopefully you and your lovely team will put my LinkedIn profile, connect with me, and I put stuff in there.

00:22:23:00 – (St John Craner): Even if you’re not selling in rural cells, there’s plenty of resources. And, in the show notes, hopefully there’ll be a link to our resource pages, which is rural sales success.com. And you can just gobble up all the goodies there. 

00:22:35:06 – (Brynne Tillman): I love it. Thank you so much for your insights. And to all our listeners. When you’re out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social.

Outro:

Thanks for watching, and join us again for more special guest instructors, bringing you marketing, sales training, and social selling strategies that will set you apart. Hit the subscribe button below to get the latest episodes from the Making Sales Social podcast, give this video a thumbs up, and comment down below on what you want to hear from us next. You can also listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube Music, and Amazon Music. Visit our website, socialsaleslink.com for more information.