2x
Sales
Productivity
1-1.5%
Margin
Improvement
One
Source of
Truth
A Simple Tool to Improve Margins… This Season
As a commercial leader in your business, you understand the importance of providing your customers with the best possible service and fair pricing. But the historical level of price changes and current methods of distributing price guidance to sales teams can be a major challenge for both your sales team and your customers.
Sales teams currently use a variety of methods to find pricing information for crop inputs, from pdfs and emails to printed materials and spreadsheets. This process can be cumbersome and time-consuming, resulting in decreased efficiency and lost margin. Ultimately though, it can drive a negative customer experience.
As technology continues to advance in Ag, the crop input sales process is becoming increasingly data-driven and reliant on digital tools. Smartwyre provides Ag retailers a simple digital solution with powerful results.
In-field pricing that reflects the guide price.
Selling more preferred product.
Better overall margin.
Increased efficiency (less time searching).
Confidence in having the right price.
Improve the customer experience by quickly providing alternatives and information.
With Smartwyre, your sales team can quickly find pricing and product information, search by active ingredient, and find preferred products. This results in increased efficiency, higher margins, and improved grower loyalty.
Case Study: Protecting Margin
Problem
A mid-sized retailer has been overwhelmed by the number of weekly price changes for crop input products since the pandemic. Commercial leadership began recognizing this strain on their sales team – as pricing to growers was below approved price guidance.
The process and tools that were reliably used for decades, were not sufficient in today’s high-velocity price change environment. The root of the problem boiling down to a few key issues:
New pricing took 2 to 6 days to reach the sales team
Sales team members searched for pricing in multiple sources
Numerous price lists adds to the complexity
The Impact on Margin
Numerous products were priced below guidance, significantly impacting margins. Smartwyre measured this across major products, revealing a 1.1-2.0% margin erosion. The figure below shows an example of the price variation found for a popular branded broadleaf weed herbicide.
Branded Broadleaf Weed Herbicide
Active Ingredient: Saflufenacil
Solution
Smartwyre was built with the needs of retailers in mind. Sales team members in the field need access to accurate, real-time information. Sales management needs to ensure that new price guidance reaches the sales team as soon as possible. Pricing not reflective of the current market rates can easily mean the loss of an order — or worse — the loss of a customer’s loyalty.
The Smartwyre team implemented its pricing solution in the winter of 2021. Seeing how easy it was to find pricing and products in the mobile app, the retailer’s sales team quickly adopted the solution and began utilizing the tool to price products. Within just a few months, the retailer saw several important benefits with figure 2 illustrating pricing detail.
Key Benefits
Increase of products priced within approved pricing guidance
Sales team productivity
Margin protection of 1.5% ($150k per $10M of Sales)
After Smartwyre - YoY Comparison
Branded Broadleaf Weed Herbicide
