If you’ve ever watched a puppy chase its tail you know that all you can do is laugh because they are never going to catch it. Meanwhile they’re burning up a lot of energy while accomplishing nothing, ending up exactly where they started.
Believe it or not, this is the time year when many 
sales people are doing the same thing.
I actually couldn’t believe it. Last week I drove across our state on my way to a gig and saw three different sales reps using a weigh wagon to harvest test plots and side by sides. And as usual, it was quite a show with pickups, trucks, tractors, weigh wagons, combines and people all over the place.
So much commotion for what?
Nothing.
I had to ask myself why the heck so many so called 21st century professionals were spending their valuable time conducting 20th century strategies. Why were they weighing varieties that are dissimilar genetically and react so differently to an environment that will never be repeated? Have we learned nothing in the last 10 years, let alone this past growing season?
Unfortunately, all I could do was laugh and shake my head.
Growers who are subjected to this kind of silliness are the real losers in those situations. I mean how bad does it have to get before seed sellers actually decide to leave the weigh wagon in the shed and do what really counts, sell themselves?
But because so many of them can’t get and keep customers on their own account, they resort to product to stay in the game. They hope they will get lucky and win a test plot or a side by side contest, at which time someone will actually want to buy something.
We still have 21st century field sellers who believe that if they have new and better products they will sell more.
Gee, if growers actually bought product we wouldn’t need sales people now would we.
Chasing the tail is exactly the kind of weak belief and action-less effort every sales rep has, just before being soundly defeated by the competition. The competition loves tail chasers because they have no plans or strategies. Seed sellers who chase their tales believe they never have the right products for the right places at the right time. They jump from variety to variety on every grower’s farm depending on what performed best the previous year. Every year they fail because tail chasers are always wrong. They choose the product that would have done well last season and that is always a mistake.
14 reasons Why Tail Chaser Never Win:
- When you’re constantly waiting for the next best product to get a customer for you, you have no belief in your company, your products or yourself.
- When you don’t believe in yourself, your customers don’t believe in you either.
- When you attempt to outguess Mother Nature by selling different varieties every year you are always wrong.
- 80% of the performance of your varieties is out of your control so how can you control performance by controlling product?
- When you change products all of the time buyers lose confidence in you and your products.
- When you jump from product to product, you never get to solve problems that face growers involving soil types, management differences or weather patterns.
- When you jump from product to product you focus only on product and not on any of the other values you have to offer, many of which directly affect product performance.
- When you focus only on product performance, your customer focuses only on product performance.
- When you focus on product, you have no point of differentiation from any other competitors because all they sell is product too.
- When you chase your tail by trying to find the best product to sell every year you have no strategy, you just respond to what has already happened to you in the past.
- When you chase your tail you avoid using the only strategies that guarantee success and that is cross- selling multiple products to multiple growers.
- When you focus only on selling product, you tend to sell “sample” size orders rather than larger quantities because you don’t want to take the chance that they won’t work the first time.
- When you chase your tail you negate any involvement the grower had in the performance of your products which is often the biggest factor in performance.
- When you chase your tail you get only one chance with a new customer. If it doesn’t perform you can never go back.
Finally, what is the grower actually thinking about during all of this? Instead of trying to teach a grower how to manage the variables, we keep teaching him to continue to chase his tale in trying to decide what to plant next season.
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