Hippo camp // Step 6 // Sales and Marketing Plan

Most people who start farms do so because they enjoy growing food, working outside, or creating with their hands. Most aren't in it to sell stuff. The problem with that is that we need to sell stuff in order to create a business rather than a large, exhausting hobby. It takes a lot of bunches of kale to pay a mortgage, people!

Making a marketing plan to help sell those kale bunches can be an even harder ask on a farmer. It makes sense to build a budget and crop plan, but a marketing plan? When I read "Marketing Plan" it evokes thoughts of designing brochures, sending weekly emails that will get passed over or deleted, and giving away free things to convince people to sign up for my CSA. I've tried those things and they haven't worked for me, maybe because I did them halfheartedly and ineffectively. Or maybe because I was sending them to the wrong people, at the wrong time, and in the wrong way. Instead of telling you how to create an effective email marketing plan, today we're going to do an exercise like we did with our "Ideal Farm". In this step we're going to dream up our "Ideal Customer". Then we're going to sell them kale.

This step relies on the idea of the Pareto Principle (according to Wikipedia this principle is also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity). It means that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In business it means that 80% of our sales typically come from 20% of our customers. Follow the steps below to determine who those 20% are, how to give them "sticky fingers", and how to prioritize them without offending the other 80% of your customers.

In this step you will need
Your "ideal farm" description if you have one
Any numbers on your customers that you have (wholesale sales records, CSA evaluations, etc)
If you like drawing you can grab some fun pens for this step
Paper or a blank word document

The goal of this step
To identify your target customers, set your prices, and identify marketing priorities for the year.

Time needed
60 + minutes (more if you're doing this for the first time)

Process
First, remember that you've already imagined your Ideal Farm. That's the farm that you are going to describe below. If your business is newer and doesn't quite match your ideal yet, that's ok. This is what you are working towards. If you've been in business for a while, try to answer the questions truthfully to the business that you want to run, not the one you think you should because of your customers. It's entirely possible that you may go through this process and realize that the customers you are trying to please aren't your 20%. That's ok too. That's what happened to us the first time we did this exercise.

Ok here we go!

Get some paper and answer the following questions:
(I'll give some fictitious examples to get you thinking)

1. Define what your business does, and what's important to it
   This could be a mission statement, a list of adjectives that describe your farm, etc
   ex: Our farm grows things for salads. We grow enough carrots, beets, radishes, cucumbers, salad greens and micro greens to supply a salad CSA, a farmers market, and 5 local restaurants.
   Be very specific. Try to stay away from flowery language. Get down to the real core of what it is you do at your farm. Only add in buzz words if they are really important to you. Buzz words being: fresh, organic, healthy, nutritious, local, etc etc etc.
   
   
2. Describe your product
   What do you produce? What does it look like? Feel like? Pretend you're telling your mom.
   ex: We sell boxes of salad mixes. We have four types, and they look like ones you'd get in the grocery store. We also grow salad toppings. We sell a CSA, which means we basically give people a salad kit every week, all year long. We also sell all that stuff at the farmers market. At the market we sell the pre-boxed greens mixes and we lay out all the toppings like you'd see at a normal farmers market.
   Again, be specific. What is it that you do that makes your product unique?
   
   
3. Define your typical customer
   Ok, put your effort in here folks. Close your eyes, and think of your typical customer. What do they look like? What do they value? What is their home life like? Draw a picture of them, name them, make this person as real as you can. If there is a real life person to model after then use them as inspiration. Do this for each of your sales streams.
   ex: Farmers Market: Our typical customer is a mom in her 30s. She seems pretty healthy, and I know she eats epic salads for lunch most days. She is one of those special people who meal preps and cuts up all her salad toppings on Sunday, right after coming home from the market. She is pretty well-off I think, or maybe she values food enough to pay more for the good stuff. Either way she doesn't seem to mind about prices. She has a husband and two kids, and I don't think they really eat the salads, but she buys extra carrots and cucumbers to put in the kids' lunches. She really values consistency because she's such a planner and it throws her off when we are out of something that she usually buys. What does she value? Well I'm not sure if she cares that our vegetables are organic, but she is anti-plastic.
   Get as full of a picture of this person as you can. Have they ever given you feedback? Compliments? What did they say? With wholesale customers, how do they like to communicate? When have you struggled with them, why? Have fun with it!
   
   
4. Define your Ideal Customer
   Most of us have multiple types of typical customers, but let's drill down deeper here. Who is spending the most money at your business? Look for customers who regularly spend over $40 at the farmers market. What do they have in common? Which restaurant had the highest sales last year? You may think you know your ideal customer, but this step often surprises me. Go through and highlight the people who are actually making you money. Are they the adorable grandma who brings you hand written recipes every week, but requests "just a handful of greens this week please"? Or are they the busy foodie mom who breezes through every week, fills her reusable tote bag as full as she can, then waits patiently as your antiquated credit card reader tries and fails to read her shiny new chip card? We all love our farmers market grandmas (mine's name is Gail), but in this step we're highlighting chip card mom.
   
   
5. Refine your product
   Now let's look at our product again. How do we get chip card mom to buy more veg? How do we get her to tell her friends about us? Remember, we aren't forgetting about our farmers market grandmas, we're just tweaking to make ourselves more attractive to the big spenders. Look again at what your big spenders value. Can you modify your product to make them happier?
   ex: Hmm. The salad eating mom hates plastic, she tells me that all the time, and she often asks if our clamshells can be recycled. I wonder if she'd prefer compostable boxes? What if we set it up like a salad bar instead, with boxes of greens and tongs so she can bring her own bags if she wants? How many other customers care about plastic? Maybe we can be like a lower plastic using farm? We could say that on our website even.
   We're creating sticky fingers here, people. That's when someone grabs your kale one week and it was so dang good that they have to get their mitts on it again next week. What makes shopping with you enjoyable to them? Do you need to bite the bullet and upgrade your chip reader so that people can pay with their watch? What if you emailed all of your chef customers and asked them if your delivery schedule works for them? They might appreciate it.
   
6. Define your product for the coming year
   Finally, list out your three sales channels again, and the products you sell to each market. Define them in price, timing, quantity, means of communication, and anything else you can think of. Be specific. These numbers are going into your crop plan.
   ex: Farmers market: 1 market, May - October. Same quantity of salad mix as last year, but in bulk this time. Increase the number of cucumbers and carrots by 20% because I'm going to focus on selling more things that can double as salad toppings and items for kids' lunches. I'm going to upgrade my signage and make sure it's obvious that we're switching to bulk greens. I'll charge an extra $0.10 if someone wants a bag, but I'll make them available. I should also have a photo of our farm crew next to the solar panels to show how eco-conscious we are. I'll upgrade our card reader and put a sign right at the register to people know they can easily use all sorts of payments. We're going to make sure we overproduce greens by 5% so that we will absolutely always have enough for the whole 6 hour market every week.
   
7. Highlight and put on the to-do list
   Go back through once more and highlight anything that jumps out at you. Do you need to chat with wholesale customers over the winter? Do you need to upgrade your farmers market table cloths? Make a to-do list with those items and put the list with your business planning paperwork. We'll use it when we get to the calendar step. Nice job!
   

Final thoughts:

The steps above require that you pay attention to your customers, and that can take time. I have a document called "things people say" that I keep in my google drive and on my phone. I try to notice what words people use to describe our produce and their experience as our customers. I drive my social media posts towards those words, or phrases. I notice when people struggle with our CSA set up or website and I quickly make changes to make things easier. I also try to learn peoples names.

A final, final thought about providing a consistent customer experience, which comes from the book The E-Myth. In the book the author relates a story of going to get a haircut. Please enjoy it below. I think it's a good lesson.

"I went to a barber who, in our first meeting, gave me one of the best haircuts I had ever had. He was a master with the scissors and used them exclusively, never resorting to electric shears as so many others do. Before cutting my hair, he insisted on washing it, explaining that the washing made cutting easier. During the haircut, one of his assistants kept my cup of coffee fresh. In all, the experience was delightful, so I made an appointment to return. When I returned, however, everything had changed. Instead of using the scissors exclusively, he used the shears about 50 percent of the time. He not only didn’t wash my hair but never even mentioned it. The assistant did bring me a cup of coffee, but only once, never to return. Nonetheless, the haircut was again excellent.

Several weeks later, I returned for a third appointment. This time, the barber did wash my hair, but after cutting it, preliminary to a final trim. This time he again used the scissors exclusively, but, unlike the first two times, no coffee was served, although he did ask if I would like a glass of wine. At first I thought it might be the assistant’s day off, but she soon appeared, busily working with the inventory near the front of the shop. As I left, something in me decided not to go back. It certainly wasn’t the haircut—he did an excellent job. It wasn’t the barber. He was pleasant, affable, seemed to know his business. It was something more essential than that. There was absolutely no consistency to the experience. The expectations created at the first meeting were violated at each subsequent visit. I wasn’t sure what to expect. And something in me wanted to be sure. I wanted an experience I could repeat by making the choice to return. The unpredictability said nothing about the barber, other than that he was constantly—and arbitrarily —changing my experience for me. He was in control of my experience, not I. And he demonstrated little sensitivity to the impact of his behavior on me. He was running the business for him, not for me. And by doing so, he was depriving me of the experience of making a decision to patronize his business for my own reasons, whatever they might have been. It didn’t matter what I wanted. It didn’t matter that I enjoyed the sound of the scissors and somehow equated them with a professional haircut. It didn’t matter that I enjoyed being waited on by his assistant. It didn’t matter that I enjoyed the experience of having my hair washed before he set to work and that I actually believed it would improve the quality of the haircut. I would have been embarrassed to ask for these things, let alone to give my reasons for wanting them. They were all so totally emotional, so illogical. How could I have explained them, or justified them, without appearing to be a boob? What the barber did was to give me a delightful experience and then take it away."