Where is your marketing plan? In your head or on paper?

Farm and Ranch February 22, 2010 If there is one thing Jim Leifer, a crop insurance specialist with Fairfield-Waverly Insurance, emphasizes over and over again about marketing plans for grain producers is that you must write it down. You just can’t keep it in your head.

Leifer: “If you don’t have a written plan out you are going to sell your crop more by emotion than you are by sound data that you build into your marketing plan. A marketing plan needs to be proactive instead of reactive and most farmers‘ plans, if they are not written out, they will be controlled by emotion and become reactive.”

Of course you have to have a marketing plan before you can write it down. Well, here is what Leifer finds.

Leifer: “I had two seminars up here at the Ag Expo. Probably 30 people at each seminar. One guy had a written marketing plan. One of them. I did seminars last fall, about 150 people. One person had a written marketing plan. Three of them had marketing plans but only one of them had written.”

Just to drive Leifer’s basic point home again.

Leifer: “If you don’t write your marketing plan and then proactively follow that marketing plan, don‘t be controlled by emotion. Again I stress, if you write it down and do it over a period of years you are going to be a better marketer than you have been in the past.”

Tomorrow, more from Leifer on marketing plans.

I’m Bob Hoff and that’s the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on the Northwest Ag Information Network.

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