For the average General Manager/CEO, a grower meeting can be a costly experience.

It’s that time of year again, and your growers are in your office regularly. Even though working with your customer face-to-face is the best way to nurture and progress these relationships, the time it takes for you to prepare for grower meetings is costly.

Gathering Documentation for the Meeting

You may know that you have made this customer money throughout the past year, but you need documentation to back it up.

Getting that documentation can be arduous. A grower meeting requires you to request:

  • Financial reports from accounting
  • Updates from your agronomy, energy, feed, and grain department leaders
  • Input from your customer service department

While these requests don’t take you too long to execute, the information can take your team hours to put together. This disrupted time could be better utilized by you and your team and negatively affects your bottom line.

Analyzing Information and the Grower Relationship

When you finally receive the multiple reports required, it takes you too long to go through them, absorbing what they say and how that affects your relationship with the grower. Again, this is time that could be better spent actually running your business.

A Tool that Does it All For You

As a manager you need a quick and easy way to access your customer account information. This information could be everything from previous transactions and contract pricing details to currently scheduled farm visits or customer complaints.

It needs to be quickly accessed and presented in a “no-nonsense” fashion.

You shouldn’t have to pour over reports to determine profitability. Instead, you should have a tool that quickly tells you what the data means and how it affects you and your customer.

During a customer visit I sat with a manager who has a tool like this, which is benefiting both the organization and the customer:

  • Meetings with growers are more productive and require less preparation time
  • The organization runs more efficiently, creating a happier and more productive team
  • The customer base is more committed

This is the type of organization you are striving run.