Self-Devpt. Nuggets™

“Mr Tayo, Good morning. I’m greatly pleased with your advice and sale strategies given to promote increase in yields and low over head costs. Please kindly permit me to use this avenue to request every assistance you could offer in getting buyers for my cat fish. I live in Akure, in Ondo state. I really need your help in this regard. I appreciate your sincere efforts and anticipated response. Thanks. from Engr Taiwo <surname removed>. 080<phone number removed>”

Tomorrow, I launch my new “Sales & Marketing Coaching Program for Farm Business CEOs”

It will be a video DVD series coupled with an optional LIVE support service. Frequent requests for help from farm CEOs (like the one reproduced above) finally made me decide to offer this formal service.

What some of us take for granted, is like rocket science to others.

I think I was born with ready made selling skills. My mother once told me I am capable of persuading a person to do almost anything.

Maybe that was an exaggeration.

But I can confirm that this ability of mind is the key to my increasingly growing success as an entrepreneur – both online and off the web.

In developing and implementing my business marketing strategies, I have never attended any formal training.

Instead, most of what I do today I conceived on my own, sometimes after studying what other successful experts were doing.

Many times however, I followed my intuition and instincts to add my own unique twist in implementing whatever I learnt.

As a result, I have over time succeeded in using fairly unusually creative methods to successfully promote my products and services to specific target audiences.

The problem however has always been that I simply assumed that I only needed to hint at what I’d done, for others to learn how to do it for themselves too. I wrongly assumed others could easy learn how to do it themselves the way I did it.

So I’ve been writing many articles sharing my ideas, but without offering full details – be it free or for a fee.

The result has been that so many farm CEOs who read my “Smart Farm Business Marketing Ideas” articles keep calling me to ask if I can help them put them to use.

Most times I’ve simply replied that they try doing the needed thinking to make successful use of them – giving them additional tips on phone.

But then a few days ago I discovered the above email, that I surprisingly missed when it came into my Facebook message in box on February 5th 2012 – 2 years ago!

In fact, the same day I saw that email, I discovered 7 others which I also somehow NEVER saw when they arrived – during the past 18 months or so!

And they were from enquirers about my various products and services – from within and outside Nigeria.

What even made this more strange, was the fact that the messages ONLY appear when I check my messages in Facebook from my Blackberry.

Even now, when I check from my laptop, NOT one of them is visible! (If anyone has any clue as to why this happens email me via tayo at tksola dot com – I’d LOVE to know)

Anyway, feeling guilty, I decided to call the gentleman whose email appears above, because he included a phone number (I’ll respond to the others later on).

After I’d introduced myself, he told me he’d been unable to find enough buyers to offload his farm output, and not hearing from me, had decided to suspend his farm operations.

I then asked if he would be willing to resume operations if he could gain access to a reliable action plan for attracting profitable buyers for his products.

He responded in the affirmative.

Apart from his response, my review of marketing challenges faced by poultry farm business owners in some other African nations, also made me resolve to create my “Sales & Marketing Coaching Program for Farm Business CEOs”.

For instance, an article published in the Vanguard newspaper, a few days ago, had this title:

Nigeria: Plateau Poultry Farmers Cry Over Excess Harvest of Eggs (click to read).

In it, we are told the farmers asked the CEO of Grand Cereal and Oil Mills Ltd, producers of Vital feeds, to help them out by mopping up the excess eggs they were stuck with as a result of a glut currently being experienced.

For me, that request was not practical, since Grand Cereals is NOT an NGO, and the CEO needs to ensure spending done yields useful benefits, especially profits to the company. Buying more eggs than they have need for will therefore not really make sense.

Not surprisingly, the CEO advised the farmers to work towards marketing their products more effectively, even as he promised to help out a bit, by purchasing eggs for delivery to schools, as a public service of sorts.

Out of curiosity, I called up a new client who recently bought my Poultry Farm Manager software for use on his farm in Jos, Plateau state.

I asked him if the news about the glut of poultry eggs was true. He confirmed that it was.

When I told him about the service I plan to offer to help farmers facing such a challenge, he promptly told me he would be interested.

That’s what convinced me this would be a good thing to do. My clients very often tell me what new product or service to develop, that will interest them. And this particular challenge was one that I’d actually forseen that I would have to help out with. In fact, I recently published a fictional story about a Farm Business couple (click now) as a basis for sharing my insights on what can be done.

And I always listen!

If you’d like to learn how you can access this DVD program, and the optional support service I offer with it, click here to send me a message now.

PS: Related Article

Story: After Resolving Layers Feeding Problems, Selling Increased Eggs Output Became a Headache