“Can’t see the flowers for the trees”

Kevin started in the Ag business a few years before I was born though he never pulled that card on me. He was wonderfully open to ideas, differing viewpoints and the innovations of an evolving marketing landscape. Yet, over four decades, one tends to amass some habits and the years leave their telltale signs. Kevin insisted on printing everything. He would print out emails he wanted to save. He would print items for review and make edits on the printed copy (something that is handy if you do it right). He had piles on legal pads with notes scribbled all over them. He insisted on adding “the” in front of popular social media channels and calling them The Facebook and The YouTube.

One piece of modern technology Kevin had mastered was the phone and he was on the phone a tremendous amount. He answered calls from dealers trying to finalize an order and from customers looking for installation instructions and from me telling him to stop putting “the” in front of Facebook. Unfortunately, traveling with Kevin meant listening to him at a near screaming volume explain to people that we would be at the dealership at 8 a.m. We surmised that Kevin was talking so loud so that if the cell signal failed, the person on the other end could just roll down their window because that was how loud he was. When the inevitable office shuffle happened, you needed to know what you were getting into if you sat next to Kevin.

He’s working in baby numbers

I got to work with Kevin as the whirlwind of modern marketing metrics and processes was getting started Seemingly overnight and across much of the marketing world, refined processes were upended in the name of “progress” and numbers that were once not subject for debate could be rewashed until they supported a chosen strategy.

An easy example was the shift from reporting sales to reporting “opportunities”. As the world of lead generation got a boost from technology, marketers started reporting the number and value of opportunities their efforts produced. Implicit in the reports was that the money was as good as in the bank unless the sales folks screwed it up. Kevin was not buying it. Being an old sales dog, he refused to believe salespeople would deliberately ignore a good lead. And he had good reason to be suspicious. A shift from sales to “opportunities” throws open the door to all sorts of tomfoolery. When the focus and reward shifts from producing dollars to producing "qualified” leads and you get to say what is qualified, you could have a t-shirt giveaway and label anyone who asks for a t-shirt a “qualified” lead.

My mentor sums up this situation succinctly: people respect what you inspect. If the cookies are getting handed out for the number of leads, expect there to be some (if not a lot) of ballot stuffing.

 Kevin managed his own leads. He reviewed the notes provided with each one and reconciled the inquiry with the customer potential to make a connection. Sometimes Kevin called prospects directly. Oftentimes he would reach out to the dealer to discuss. No matter what, if they were genuinely qualified or had the potential to be, they were put on a path towards loyal ownership. Kevin would always do at least the minimum for people that expressed interest in ownership, but he was incredibly careful to not overstate their potential or value until it was a genuine realty.

Now, this is normally the part where people might accuse someone like Kevin of being behind the times and not embracing technological change and blah, blah, blah- but reality was exactly the opposite. Kevin would often track the path of customers through the lead system from first contact to sale. He kept an incredibly close watch on the flow of prospects.

One such situation was a family in Kansas. One of the brothers from a farming operation had posted a receipt from the grain elevator showing a perfect grain sample and Kevin (of course) printed out the photo and carried it with him on a trip. As it happened, our travel took us near the farm, so a little internet snooping and we tracked down the farmers’ wife and found out where he was harvesting. We pulled down the road toward the running combines and the farmer was stunned. Kevin was a bit of a celebrity in the Gleaner world and to see him walking across the field towards the combine was a bit of a shock.

“I saw the black Suburban coming down the road and I thought you guys were the state police coming to get me,” the farmer said.

“For what,” I answered back without thinking about how it sounded.

I had wondered where Kevin’s commitment for being a stickler for honest numbers and processes had come from. I imagine that a guy trained by the Army to dial in coordinates where a giant exploding shell is supposed to land may have formed opinions as to how fuzzy numbers can be. Moreover, Kevin saw giving disingenuous numbers to his bosses as a betrayal and possible impetus for an unfair situation where the boss would be caught flat-footed and exposed.

Kevin also had a clarity about marketing numbers that was both needed and effective. While we were congratulating ourselves for the number of views a video had received online, Kevin was quick to remind us that only 8,000 people purchased the type of product we were selling each year. He was more please reaching 8,000 of the right people than he was having 2 million people who had hope to win a free t-shirt.

Around 2012, Kevin was determined to point out just how much more our competitor’s equipment weighed than ours and he wanted to illustrate the negative effects of all that weight. We got copies of the competitor’s sales literature, pulled their patents, and poured through every piece of technical data we could find. Kevin was not content with their numbers. He had a better idea.

Truck scales that could handle these kinds of weights were not cheap to rent and we had a limited window to use them. We also needed a friendly customer who owned the competitor’s machine. Somehow, we cobbled the whole situation together and conducted the weigh-in with the cameras rolling.

So, I want to pause right here and talk about Kevin’s reason for undertaking this expensive and involved way of getting the weight. We were about to levy a massive claim against a heavily resourced and tough competitor at an element of their design that is not easily changed or managed. We would put these numbers in the hands of our dealers and salespeople and they would be asked to put their reputation on the line with the content we gave them. Credibility was everything.

I climbed up under the competitive machine while Richard watched the scales. “This can’t be right,” someone yelled above the din of the engine. “These numbers are really high compared to their literature. 

“Do you even know how to use these scales?” I asked Kevin. “How does their combine gain this much weight from the factory to here.

His answer was sober and sobering, “by putting the tires and wheels on it and filling it with fuel.”

He caught them using funny math. They were publishing the weight of their machine without the tires and wheels and with an empty fuel tank. They likely never imagined someone would go get some scales and weigh them. But they did not know the Biener.

Kevin had a field day with the data. The resulting sales materials show competitive designs towing cartoonish pickup trucks, antique tractors and even bass boats behind their machine to illustrate the extra weight they drug around with them. More than that, Kevin had the added weight calculated against the horsepower to move it so he could illustrate how much engine power was taken to simply haul the extra weight through the field. He even had a giant fake weight that looked like something out of a Wile E Coyote cartoon suspend over the machine at the farm show-- all to illustrate the weight difference. Once he had real and supported data, he was merciless.

Over the years as we conducted many comparisons of all kinds, we documented our efforts not only so the sales team could use them, but that they could use them with confidence that the underlying data was true and trustworthy. The sales folks and dealers could have a level of certainty that the claims and decisions they made would be made with accurate numbers.

We filmed a lot of our studies and Kevin insisted we share these films far and wide. “Start with The YouTube,” he requested. “And then put it on The Facebook”.

"You’re Not Getting Any of This Are you Richard" is the story of one remarkable salesman, marketer, leader and friend told by those who worked by his side for years. It’s a collection of raucous accounts, emotional stories and needed lessons to inspire hearts, instruct minds and incite laughter. The book is being released over several digital channels one chapter at a time.