It’s not all that common that you hear sales and marketing being compared to farming, other than maybe hearing the old analogy, “what you sow is what you reap.” An article from Top Dog Social Media, titled “6 Things Sales & Marketing Have in Common with Farming,” emphasizes six stages of farming that correlate to successful sales and marketing.
- Planning Stage – you must plan before you plant! In sales, start with understanding the ideal client and their needs, then determine a plan of action that will help them meet those identified needs.
- Preparation Stage – you have to collect all of the tools and seeds and make sure they are new and fresh! Collecting the new and necessary recourses in sales is necessary before you put the sales funnel into action.
- Seeding Stage – time to plant the seeds! This is the time where salespeople act with understanding that it takes time to build relationships, similar to growing plants.
- Maintenance Stage – water, weed, and nurture your plants, or else they may never grow! Building relationships in sales is a similar process that “requires consistency, effort, and dedication from you,” in order that customers feel supported.
- Harvesting Stage – harvest the plants, but don’t wait too long! Once the relationship with a customer is established with trust, salespeople have to be timely in harvesting potential customers when they are ready to buy, or else the customers might never follow through on the sale.
- Analyzing Stage – analyze what worked and what didn’t for next season! Any good salesperson is going to learn from their mistakes, take into consideration the things that went well, and fine-tune their process for next time.
Farming and sales don’t seem to be so foreign to one another anymore, right?
For more details, check out the article below:
https://topdogsocialmedia.com/6-things-sales-marketing-common-farming/
duzx20 
Ethan David 
Aliyah Shelatz
This is an interesting comparison for sure. While all of the connections that this makes are good, the one I find most interesting is harvesting. Just like crops, you have to close the sale at the right time. If you do it too early, than the customer won’t be ready to make a purchase and you may scare them away. If you do it too late, than your customer will lose interest and become annoyed with the purchasing process.
I have never really thought about the comparison between farming and sales, but after reading your article the similarities are now jumping out at me. I never realized that you need to do so much preparation for farming as well. I figured there was some but not that much. Comparably, sales has a lot of preparation when you are looking for new positional customers as well as doing research for follow up meetings with people. Good article.
This is such a cool way to illustrate what a sales process looks like through that of farming. Working on a dairy farm for a few summers, I have seen this entire planting process and how it all works on a farm but never have thought about this comparison towards sales. Obviously, a different kind of preparation for sales over farming but, metaphorically speaking, it makes sense! Sweet comparison.