Every ag retailer accepts a certain level of customer churn as part of doing business. Farmers retire. Competitors show up with aggressive pricing. A salesperson leaves and takes relationships with them.
But here’s the question worth contemplating: How many of your formerly strong customers have quietly walked away, and you haven’t noticed yet?
Not the ones who called to cancel. The ones who just stopped. They ordered 400 tons of nitrogen three years ago, then 200, then 40, and this year nothing. Your competitor’s product started showing up in their fields, and because no one flagged it, no one made a call.
That’s the problem we solve at BIG Consulting. And the answer is already sitting in your ERP system.
The data is there. The challenge is getting it to talk.
Most ag retailers are running ERP systems that contain years of detailed transaction history. The problem isn’t that the data doesn’t exist. It’s that extracting multiple years of customer purchase history across dozens of products and units of measure, and then turning that data into something a sales manager can act on is hard. So, the data sits there and the lost customers stay lost.
We built our Nutrient Growth Opportunities dashboard to solve this.
A real-world example: $120,000 hiding in plain sight
We worked with a large Midwest agricultural cooperative. Their total nitrogen sales year-over-year looked relatively stable, nothing to sound an alarm. But the aggregate view hides the truth.
When we applied our process to identify customers with the most significant volume declines, we found 124 customers, just 11.4% of the total customer base, who had once purchased over a third of this retailer’s total nitrogen and had dropped their collective purchases by more than 90% from previous levels.
That’s not a rounding error. That’s a crisis that wasn’t visible until someone looked for it.
One customer had a 53.5-ton nitrogen target based on their history but had purchased just 6.78 tons by mid-year. Their phosphorus and potassium purchases had gone to zero. The data told a clear story: this customer had silently moved their full fertilizer program to a competitor.
The good news: that’s a recoverable relationship, but only if you know there is a need to make a call.
The instinct is to chase your largest accounts first. But your salespeople already know those customers. If that business walked, there’s usually a known reason.
The recoverable opportunity most often sits in the middle, customers who ordered 50–150 tons a year for a decade and quietly trailed off. A busier-than-usual selling season, a change in territory, a salesperson stretched too thin. It doesn’t take much for a motivated competitor to step in.
The business case for taking action
Here’s what makes this opportunity so compelling: the infrastructure to serve these customers is already in place. Your people, systems, and processes exist. The marginal cost of adding volume to a returning customer is low, which means recovered margin flows nearly straight to the bottom line.
In the example above, recapturing just 50% of one year’s lost nitrogen volume, approximately 1,200 tons at a conservative $100/ton gross margin, represents $120,000 in recovered profitability. From customers already in your database, with relationships your team has already built.
What your data is telling you
If a customer who used to consistently buy 50 tons of nitrogen a year from you quietly dropped to 10 tons last year, would you know today?
If the answer is “probably not,” which means there’s an opportunity in your data that isn’t being captured. Your ERP knows which customers are slipping. Our process surfaces them, prioritizes them, and puts them in front of your sales team with the context they need to have a meaningful conversation.
There’s always a story behind the decline. Sometimes it’s a competitor. Sometimes it’s something you can fix. And sometimes it just takes a phone call.
Contact our team today to learn more or find more real-world examples like this on our website.