Customer Relationships
Michigan Valley
MVI Vendors
MVI Customers
Michigan Valley
A Two-Sided Endeavor
Most any business that has customers also is a customer. Very few can provide a product or service without needing some type of input or service to keep their customers happy.
Let’s talk about Michigan Valley Irrigation and make a couple of assumptions first.
We are in business to make money.
While having fun is great, we all have needs & bills.
We need products and services to meet our customer needs.
Each interaction can influence a relationship.
Relationships are built on trust.
It takes people to build relationships.
While technology and things like A.I. appear to be minimizing the need for human intervention and contact, it does not appear likely that the need for people is about to go away anytime soon. These tools can make us more efficient and often reduce or simplify tasks (especially if they work properly). A quick snapshot of the industry of agriculture demonstrates that more people are being fed with fewer people and acres than ever before. Technology can be a good thing, but people are still involved.
In the simplest of terms, we sell pivots by buying the pieces, constructing the system and getting paid more than our cost to get the parts and put them together in your fields. If we make too many mistakes and incorrectly perform those functions multiple times, we will not be able to continue. Michigan Valley needs to provide what you agree to at a fair price in a reasonable amount of time. Communication is critical to a satisfactory transaction. While this seems very simple, it is not. Many factors and estimations are done. For this reason, past experience with similar situations is critical to future opportunities.
Every single day interactions between customers and vendors are important. Every call, personal meeting, email, text or invoice between customer and vendor is both an opportunity to build or damage relationships. Regardless of the rank or position in the organization, it matters. Our goal is to have an honest, positive impact with each customer or vendor contact.
Michigan Valley has dozens of vendors supplying us with the inputs required to deliver the things that we sell. With Valley being an obvious provider down to the caterer who helps with lunch at our annual customer day, we make choices. Yes, price is a consideration, but many other factors are weighed in our chosen suppliers. Reliability, professionalism, integrity, timeliness, performance, and consistency are a few that come to mind. If Valley shipped us a pivot and the gearboxes were all missing a gear, that would reflect on us. If the selected caterer charged $3 less per plate but missed the event by 3 hours, we would have some hungry disappointed customers during our annual customer day.
MVI Customer Day
A similar relationship can be considered with employees. While more than a couple have used us as a training ground and either started a competing dealership or gone to work for one, our existing staff still has over 450 years of combined irrigation experience.
For times that any member of our organization is less than courteous or unprofessional, we apologize. We respectfully request that you do the same. I learned a long time ago that every time you interact with another person, you do not know what they have experienced in the previous hours or days. They may have won the lottery or welcomed a new baby, or they may have experienced a tornado on their farm or lost a family member in an accident. Respond appropriately with an open mind, it could be you.
As your provider of irrigation equipment, we thank you for your business and look forward to earning your future business.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pete is the marketing manager for Michigan Valley Irrigation, having joined the company in 2016. He was raised on a dairy farm in western New York and graduated from Cornell University with a B.S. in agricultural economics. His entire working career of over 37 years has been involved in agriculture. A farmer helping farmers. When away from Michigan Valley he operates, Joyful Noise Farm, a small livestock and produce farm and spends time with his family.
