INSIDE AGRI-TURF

Possibly the biggest challenge facing businesses today is recruiting the most suitable staff, and then taking every step necessary to ensure that they stay in the company or organisation.

In a two-part episode on Recruitment and Retention, I talk to Paul Harris, the founder of Real Success Ltd, a company specialising in meeting the staffing requirements of the farming community. His down-to-earth and highly practical advice is relevant to the land-based engineering sector – or any business without a fully functioning HR department.

In this first episode, Paul advises not to panic when faced with sudden staffing needs.  He says careful planning is necessary and clear steps to identify candidates, leading to crafting an offer of employment with legal obligations.

LINKS

Real Success Ltd

Indeed.com

Real Success Indeed website

Andrew Findley is an experienced competitor in ultra endurance running events ranging from 200 km races in the 50 degree heat of the Sahara to a 300 km race across the French Alps in the biting cold - whilst climbing the equivalent of Everest three times.

The quality that all competitors need in such events is resilience – which can simply be summed up as the ability to keep going. In other words “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”.

But it is never just about toughness, there are many other qualities that Andrew has discovered during the events.

Today, Andrew is a motivational speaker talking to groups and businesses about resilience.  Of being able to cope successfully with the bad or difficult times – and you can be assured that Andrew experienced many of those during his participation in extreme conditions.

In this episode, Andrew talks about the conditions he faced, and what he found out about himself during the events that could help those facing challenges in business or life itself.

A link below will take you to an article Andrew wrote for Sorted magazine

LINKS

Andrew Findley website

Article: The Road to Resilience

In this episode, St John Craner, connects the two important elements of The Art of the Sales Conversation, that of listening, and then asking the right questions at the right time and in the right way.

He says "I think it's really important that if you want to succeed in sales, you need to be a student of psychology. You need to get curious and study the basic laws of human nature and behavior. Psychology is a rural sales superpower; of that I'm absolutely convinced"

"There are three magic words that you should always say in your conversations, if you want the conversation to keep going. They are 'Tell me more'. ."

LINKS

The Art of the Sales Conversation - Part One

St John Craner on LinkedIn

Website

AriensCo, the US parent company of British lawn tractor maker, Countax have announced that the production of both Countax and Westwood tractors at Great Haseley in Oxfordshire will cease by the end of 2023 –the Great Haseley site will be used as a sales and service operation for the home market only.

The Ariens statement suggests that there is no future for Countax or Westwood garden tractors made in the UK, or anywhere else - and have confirmed that there are no plans to use the Countax or Westwood brand names in the future.

In this episode I look back over the extraordinary + 30 year history of Countax which started in 1990, and includes extracts from an interview I recorded in October 2021 with the founder Harry Handkammer

Countax UK

AriensCo

Episode produced and edited by Chris Biddle

In the first part of his series of The Customer is always Right, Dan Pratt, founder of DAP Consultancy talked about different types of customers, their behaviour, and ways of successfully diffusing difficult situations.

In this episode Dan says that receiving a complaint should often be looked at as a positive business opportunity – and at relatively low-cost.

He also talks about goodwill gestures which can often work wonders - and how to practically deal with negative on-line reviews which are often unjustified.

LINKS

DAP Consultancy

EPISODE NOTES: The Importance of Creating Goodwill amongst Customers

LISTEN TO PART 1 of The Customer is Always Right?

ROUND TABLE PANEL with Dan Pratt. Interested? EMAIL Chris for details

The recent New Scientist Live event in London, provided the farming and food producing industry with a wonderful opportunity to present its credentials to a largely non-rural audience - and to children.

Reflecting on the event and the ‘terrifyingly insightful questions’, are Anna Eccleston, Commercial Director for the Farmers Weekly, Richard Charles, After Sales Manager, AGCO Corporation and Daniel Fasham from the Agricultural Engineers Association (AEA) who was representing the We Are Land-based Engineering campaign launched at the end of 2022.

The We Are . . . campaign organised and manned an information point and quiz - and acted as a gateway to the machinery and interactive displays provided by AGCO, John Deere and Kuhn UK in the land-based engineering section

LINKS

New Scientist Live

Farmers Weekly

We Are Land-based Engineering

AGCO Corporation

John Deere

Kuhn UK

'The Customer is Always Right' was a mantra instilled into staff by Gordon Selfridge when he opened his landmark London department store in the early 1990s.

Does that still hold true for businesses in the 21st century?

Dan Pratt, founder of a customer experience agency DAP Consultancy says "Yes . .except when they are wrong!"

Dan has worked in customer relations most of his career in a variety of industries. He once manned a customer complaints phone line "being shouted at for 8 hours a day"

In this episode he describes the different types of customer, and how to categorise and deal with complainants. He also talks about ways of combatting negative, and often unjustified, online reviews.

This the second episode in our new podcast The Agri-Turf Academy Show and ideally complements the first episode on selling by St John Craner (link below).

DAP Consultancy

The Art of the Sales Conversation by St John Craner

The first episode of The Agri-Turf Academy Show, a new podcast to complement the Inside Agri-Turf shows which have notched up over 10,000 downloads and featured more than 100 guests from across the land-based engineering sector.

This opening episode, The Art of the Sales Conversation (Part One) is delivered by St John Craner, (pronounced Sinjin) founder of New Zealand-based Agrarian, a leading rural sales and marketing company.

St John's key message is 'The problem with sales, is selling. Stop selling and start serving'

LINKS

Agrarian

St John Craner LinkedIn

To complement this Inside Agri-Turf podcast, I am delighted to announce the creation of a new show.

The Agri-Turf Academy will focus on people not products. It will publish episodes of relevance to anyone working in, or associated with, the land-based engineering sector featuring advice and tips on sales and marketing, customer relations, recruitment and retention, display and merchandising, well-being issues, social media - and much more.

All delivered by experts in their field.

This episode includes brief extracts from two of the early episodes, both focussing on the most important person to your business, the customer. These are:

The Art of the Sales Conversation by St John Craner, who runs Agrarian, a leading New Zealand based sales and marketing specialising in rural sales

The Customer is Always Right? by Dan Pratt founder of DAP Consultancy, specialising in helping companies sharpen up their customer experience

Described as the World’s Greatest Festival of Ideas and Discoveries, New Scientist Live (NSL) will this year have Farming and Food Production as its largest feature. The 2023 edition of NSL will be held from 7-9 October at ExCel London.

The talks and hands-on visitor experiences featuring the innovative and ground-breaking ways that food is produced is being curated by the Farmers Weekly in partnership with a collective of commercial and educational partners from across the agricultural sector.

In this preview of the event, Anna Eccleston, Commercial Director and Project Leader at the Farmers Weekly and Kit Franklin of Harper Adams University, one the speakers, talk about how their initial displays at the 2019 NSL proved highly successful - and why an enhanced presence at NSL 2023 will aim to inform and educate consumers of the route from farm to fork utilising the latest state-of-the-art technology.  

LINKS

New Scientist magazine

Future of Food and Agriculture NS microsite

We Are Land-based Engineering

John Deere Ltd

AGCO

Kuhn Machinery