A Beneficial Summer

The greatest salespersons in any industry are usually individuals that possess dreamlike people skills.  They understand how to effectively communicate their information to the client.  They understand how to approach each customer with ideas that can help them be successful.  An effective salesperson cares about the relationships they create with clients.  One aspect of sales that is often over looked is that successful salespersons are always learning.

Insert my summer internship at Bayer CropScience.  Knowing my end goal after graduation is to work in the agricultural sales industry, I wanted to look for an internship that would benefit me down the road.  With my previous internship, I was able to see some of that sales side and learn from some fantastic professionals.  Which helped me realize that if I wanted to improve even more, I needed to understand the industry in a full spectrum.  My Bayer internship could not have offered a better experience for me.  As a Crop Protection intern, my duties included being the right hand man to one of their Senior Scientists.  My boss for the summer will always be someone that I will credit a lot of my knowledge in the field to.  As a veteran in the agricultural research world, his 35+ years of experience and dedication are incredible.  He and I began the summer planting numerous test plots and as intense as that process was, we began spraying.  I started a lot of my days by mixing different herbicides that we planned on spraying for that day.  Many of our herbicides that we were testing were pre-emergence, meaning that we had to apply them before the crop would emerge from the ground.  This made our time window to apply these herbicides very short.  Between the amount that we needed to do and the amount of rain we received early in the season, he and I were forced to work some long days.  My favorite part of the summer was looking at how all of the plots were affected by each individual herbicide with my boss.  He gave me great insight to the entire growing process from day one.  I can walk away from this summer saying that I learned from one of the best in research.  He challenged me to learn something new every day, and there were many days that I drove home from work thinking I could write a book on his knowledge that he had shared with me in that day alone. 

I wanted to learn more about the research side of the industry so in the future I would be much more capable of explaining how it works to customers.  After my summer of working at Bayer, I learned how much time and effort it takes on the research side to produce success.  More importantly, I gained experience and knowledge that will benefit me in the future.

Cheesy Doesn't Mean it isn't True

We've all heard the same quote over and over “children are the future.” Always sounded a bit cheesy to me. It’s been said at every graduation, in any speech about education reform, and after every tragedy. But have you ever really considered the weight of those four simple words? I know that I never did. And I never really understood the impact children could have until my nephew and nieces were born. Through my relationships with them, I rediscovered my optimistic, playful, and eager to learn inner child, but I also realized how impressionable their little minds can be. Watching them grow and learn and witnessing firsthand how malleable they are allowed me to come to understand not only that cheesy quote but also the gravity of the responsibility that educators bear.

Never afraid of a challenge, I shouldered this weight in my new position as the Champaign County Farm Bureau Foundation Earth Partners and Ag Discovery intern  ̶  a bit wordy right? This summer as the CCFBF (I’m sure you’ll appreciate my abbreviations) intern, I headed up some summer Library programming. I was confident that it was going to be great. I was excited to teach kids about agriculture, the lessons had a catchy name “Green Eggs and Agriculture,” and I had experience with kids. What could go wrong?

Well for starters, only three kids showed up for the first lesson ̶ you could say I was disappointed, and the first flicker of doubt danced in my thoughts. But when I saw the excitement in their eyes and their eagerness to learn, I was reminded of the importance of my role. I hid my disappointment with a smile and taught those three kids about farmers and how they have to juggle many jobs just like the Cat juggled items on his hat. We all left happy, and I certainly felt fulfilled.

However, as the summer progressed and lesson after lesson only resulted in minimal attendance, my disappointment had returned in force. Was this even worth my time? It took three kids skipping into the library to remind me that it wasn’t a question of if “this” is worth my time, but if “they” were worth my time. And while I learned valuable lessons about advertising, outreach, and coordination, I can say unequivocally that they were, because that cheesy quote has been right all along.Children are the future.

Get Out of Your Comfort Zone

“Get out of your comfort zone”… oh this uncomfortable phrase that is supposed to mean something to us when it comes to our professional and personal development. But what does it truly mean? Embracing this phrase as a college student is just about the equivalent to telling a 6-year-old baseball player to keep their eye on the ball. It has meaning to those who already know how to swing the bat ,and make contact, but nothing to those who have little experience on home plate to begin with. I felt like that 6-year-old this summer, with everyone around me telling me to just keep my eye on the ball. I did not grow up with 4-H and have no experience with Extension whatsoever. I was definitely out of my comfort zone this summer interning with Purdue Extension. My experience here was nothing short of a home run by the end and I can say with full confidence that the phrase “keep your eye on the ball” has a whole new meaning to me now. It encompasses determination, grit, perseverance, humbleness, humility, confidence, embracing a fear of the unknown, and knowing that you don’t know what you don’t know and that there is nothing wrong with that. I had the wonderful experience of working with my two supervisors and two other interns and we made a wonderful team. Myself and the other two interns each had our own separate responsibilities, mine was being in charge of the 4-H Jr. Leaders and their schedules for events and the fair Pop Stand and Work Assignments. I created an online registration page from scratch that eliminated the need for the Jr. Leaders to hand submit their time slots for their work assignments and shifts. At the Pop Stand, my networking skills came in handy when I needed to contact over six vendors to provide food, drinks, and ice. My determination led to the Pop Stand raising over $11,000 in just 6 days to help benefit the Jr. Leaders. also hosted a 5K Color Run and Food Drive for 4-H as a fundraiser and it was a huge success. I ended up having over 150 people participate and they were able to donate 2,480 lbs. of food, equivalent to 2,066 meals. This kind of networking for hosting an event was new to me, but it all goes back to keeping my eye on the ball. I learned through this experience that it is not just about the ball, it is about how you carry yourself and how far you are willing to put yourself out there despite the fear of striking out. I had a crash course into the world of 4-H and it was a great experience.

LIFE AS A BECK'S INTERN

This summer I had the opportunity to work for Beck’s Hybrids as a sales intern for the northern Illinois sales team.  I never thought that so many skills I have learned throughout my collegiate educations would be applied in the sales field.  I feel as though Ag Leadership Education has done a great job preparing me to move into the world of sales. 

I was fortunate enough to see how 6 different seed advisors performed their jobs this summer.  I was sure to pay attention to what made each of them successful and capable of making relationships with customers.  I was able to look back at the DISK assessment that we performed in class a year ago and understand individuals as soon as I walked on the farm.  This helped me throughout my internship.

The biggest part of the summer for me though was finding what I truly loved to do.  I want to be a salesman and I want to work with farmers.  I love the thrill and challenge of getting that next sale.  When I finally realized that each farm and sales call was going to be different and have its own set of challenges it was easy to see that I wanted to engage in this kind of a career. 

I truly enjoyed my time with the sales team and also a family owned company like Beck’s.  Learning from a company that has “Farmers at Heart” has been an opportunity that I will never forget.

A Day in the Life...

Embrace change.  Always listen. Grow strong relationships.  

Change.  This is a word that makes many individuals cringe when hearing that something may change within their life or even daily routine.  Anthony J. D’Angelo once said, “Don’t fear change, embrace it.” This is something that is important to learn very early on as a Monsanto Sales Manager.  This summer I served as a US Row Crop Sales Intern for the Channel and DeKalb/Asgrow Brands and one of the first lessons I learned was to be flexible because your tasks and goals day-to-day could quickly be changed by weather conditions or the plans of your customers.  

Listen. My mentor told me, “You have one mouth and two ears, use them proportionally.”  This advice will take you far in life because you have to know what your customers want and value before selling them a product.  Once you hear out their needs and wants you can place the best product on the acre presented. One word could trigger a sale if you listen carefully and give your full attention at all times.  

Grow relationships.  “Ultimately, people buy from people.”  At the end of the day, your sales are only as strong as the relationships that you grow with your dealers and customers.  Loyalty to the product is built by repeated visits to the farm allowing the customer to build trust with you.

This is a day in the life of Kassidy Kimpling as an intern Monsanto District Sales Manager.  

Work Hard, Play Hard

This summer I was fortunate enough to be the lead manager of our beloved and the world renowned college bar Kam’s. Located in Champaign, Illinois for over 70 years, Kam’s leads a long legacy that precedes the name everywhere it travels. Being open every night from 8 pm to 2 am gives us a short window to do business compared to many other industries and even other service industries such as restaurants. This small amount of time being operational means that those 6 hours are extremely busy involving thousands of customers and varying amounts of employees. I never knew that managing that part was the easier side of the business! Apart from the nightly work that occurs while we are open and serving customers, I was also responsible for the day to day management of the employees, promotions, inventory, and preparation. With over 145 employees, scheduling everyone for every week is a task that takes learning individual preferences, availability, and effectivity. Working with this number of employees also brings responsibility for individual performance reviews and giving required feedback. Being responsible for the employees also brought me the task of promoting the exceptional workers and relieving underperforming employees of their positions. Training the newly promoted employees for their newly acquired positions was not only fun, but offered a slight challenge that I was eager to accept. I enjoyed teaching them the requirements of their job as well as showing them how to interact with their subordinates in an effective and conscientious manner. This opportunity was one that I value due to the real world applications that this prepares me for once I am in my career. One of my favorite parts of my internship was discussing promotions and ideas that will bring in customers. I was lucky enough to not only meet our suppliers, but also meet their supervisors and learn more and more about the large industry that they are involved in while also building relationships and networking. The opportunities to discuss with these individuals their organizations strengths and weaknesses combined with their knowledge of the industry gave me un-paralleled insight into a possible career path. Inventory tracking while being a dry, mundane subject and task, is very important to ensuring enough supply while also maintaining a decent margin on our products. This past summer definitely gave me the experience in management that I wanted and needed to be successful later in my career through hands on engagement with subordinates, networking abilities and knowledge, and the reminder that the little things still matter.