Hoosier Banker 33 Connecting With the Farmer Customer During the era of COVID-19 Brady Brewer, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Agricultural Economics Purdue University brewer94@purdue.edu Selling inputs to farmers has traditionally been a relationship-driven sales process, and credit is no exception. Banks compete against each other every growing season to capture the farmer’s business on operating lines of credit, machinery loans and farmland loans. Recent trends have shown that farmers are willing to purchase business inputs online, but these sales lag behind trends in other industries where online sales have skyrocketed in the recent past. Here in Indiana, the bulk of input sales to farmers normally occurs after corn and soybean harvest through planting season in mid-to-late spring, when farmers plan their crops for the next growing cycle. Farm visits, along with face-to-face meetings to discuss various items between the farmer and loan officer, are a staple of farm-to-bank relationships. In fact, many agricultural bankers serve as a sounding board and adviser to farm clients. These meetings build trust and longstanding ties between the farm owner and banker. Furthering this, many agricultural banks support learning events such as field days and university Extension meetings that farmers attend. Enter COVID-19. Face-to-face meetings now become troublesome with fear of the virus and uncertainty in the marketplace. This means that in-person meetings and a lot of the previous sales tactics used to reach farmers are severely limited. Farmers, while tech-savvy, are not as adept at Zoom, Microsoft Teams, WebEx and the host of other conferencing platforms that are available, further limiting accessibility to the farmer customer. For example, farmers are not allowing new salespeople on their farms. Meeting ag clients on their farms is a common practice that demonstrates willingness to take the time and make the effort to earn the farmer’s business. This has made prospecting and getting in front of new customers difficult for sales professionals. Many of our colleagues at the Purdue University Center for Food and Agricultural Business have been researching and educating agribusiness professionals in tactics to communicate with these customers in an adapting environment. They are currently developing educational programs focused on selling online. Reaching the farmer customer is not easy to begin with, and now the options are limited. How do bankers connect with clients that traditionally have been relationship-driven customers? First, training for loan officers will be important. Conveying the value that you can bring to the farmer by being their lender of choice now needs to be even more succinct than it previously was. Further complicating this process is that it now needs to be delivered over a medium that does not allow for the personal connection with the client to happen as naturally as face-to-face. Gone is the luxury of being able to meet with farmers and have conversations with them to earn their trust. Interactions will need to be thoughtful and appropriate for the mode of communication. Digital communication tends to be much shorter, thus it is imperative that a call be planned out with specific objectives to ensure no time is wasted. There are advantages to this scenario, however. Aissa D. Good Associate Director Purdue University Center for Food and Agricultural Business aissa@purdue.edu AG BANKING
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