Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
How Onboarding Sets Your Farm Up for Success
1 Playsin 20 hours
Barn2Door Onboarding Manager Briana joins Janelle to unpack exactly what happens after a farm signs up, detailing how the Success Department fast-tracks your setup so you can ditch the office work, and start selling direct to local Buyers.
For more Farm resources, visit: barn2door.com/resources
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Barn to Door
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Independent Farmer podcast, the go-to podcast for do-it-yourself farmers who are taking control of their own business, skipping the middleman, and selling direct to local consumer and wholesale buyers.
00:00:20
Speaker
This podcast is hosted by Barn to Door, the number one business tool for independent farmers to manage their business, promote their brand, and sell online and in person.
How does Barn to Door help farmers?
00:00:29
Speaker
Let's dive in to today's Independent Farmer podcast.
00:00:42
Speaker
Welcome to the Independent Farmer Podcast. I'm Janelle Mayocco, CEO of Barn to Door and your host for today's episode. As you may be aware, Barn to Door is all about helping independent farmers make more money, ditch the office work and look like a pro.
00:00:56
Speaker
By getting a system in place to sell direct, market under their own brand and manage orders, farmers can skip the middleman and build a strong local business with recurring sales and maximum profits.
00:01:08
Speaker
And we just debuted helping farmers with
Onboarding Experience and Farmer Goals
00:01:10
Speaker
local delivery. In today's conversation, we're gonna get into the onboarding experience with Barn to Door. Like what does it look like when you sign up or right after you sign up? Today, i am happy to welcome Brianna, who is one of our farm onboarding managers, which we internally affectionately call FONS. Welcome Brianna. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.
00:01:30
Speaker
It's really neat to sort of unpack what it actually looks and feels like for a farmer once they sign up. I mean, we have folks talking to the farmer before they sign up all about how we might help their farm. And there tends to be two or three things they're especially excited about helping with, in particular, just getting organized to manage inventory and orders and make it super easy for all of their customers to buy from them, right? Whether that's buying online through their online store. whether they're invoicing wholesalers, et cetera, but every farm is unique, right? And so it's so interesting when they get to the other side and I love that they meet onboarding managers first thing. Tell us how that
Brianna's Role and Passion for Farmers
00:02:10
Speaker
happens. How do they get in touch with you? Yeah. So once a farm
00:02:14
Speaker
signed up, right? They talk to our sales team, figure out really what their needs are. The first thing that they do is schedule their orientation meeting with us. That first meeting typically entails kind of like a meet and greet, right? It's the first time I'm meeting with the farm. So we really want to get to know them. We want to get to know their goals, the history of the farm, and then make sure that they're super clear on what we're doing and onboarding to help make sure that we're supporting their business and their business goals. So the first meeting really is just kind of a conversation, best practices and what we're going to be working on. I love it. Okay. I kind of jumped ahead because really let's talk a little bit about you first. I mean, how long have you been at Barnes Door? Why do you like being an onboarding manager?
00:02:58
Speaker
Yeah, so I've been with Barn to Door almost two and a half years. It was two years in February. I've been on the success team in onboarding since the end of 2025. So about six months now, which is crazy, flew by. and I love being an onboarding manager because... First of all, I get to meet with farmers literally all day long. I meet with eight to 12 farmers throughout the day, all unique use cases, all different types of products. But it's such a unique point of their time with Barn to Door, right? It's kind of where the rubber meets the road and figuring out, okay, this is what you want to do. This is why you're here. How are we going to get it done?
Tailored Onboarding for Farm Sizes
00:03:39
Speaker
I love that. And we are going to talk about that later because yes, you definitely have every unique, like eight to 12 farms a day, but they might be small. They might be just getting started and trying to make it a full-time farming business, or maybe they've been at it for a few years and now it's time for them to get really organized with processes and get um some systems in place for them to be even more efficient and effective in the use of their time. And then we also have some large and extra large farms, if you will, right, where they're at or over seven figures. So it's kind of amazing to be that business software that can help farmers get organized, get off the ground, engage their customers, track obviously all of their transactions and everything. But it definitely changes your conversation with them based on the size of the farm. Exactly. It changes the initial conversation. It changes pretty much every conversation after that. And it's really cool being able for me to use the software differently for each farm too.
00:04:37
Speaker
Absolutely. I love that. And best practices can get pulled all the way through all those farms too. There are some things that happen or recommendations I'm sure that you make that are consistent regardless of the size or type of farm. That's awesome. Well, we'll get into that in a minute.
Orientation and Subscription Models
00:04:50
Speaker
I was peeking at, I know this and it's good for the listeners to know.
00:04:53
Speaker
When you have your initial orientation call with Brianna, she has actually in the first call, what we call an orientation deck. Like you're actually presenting, just making sure that we actually cover what information needs to be covered in that first call.
00:05:09
Speaker
Exactly. Yes. I think that's helpful for me, but also for farmers just to kind of reiterate, okay, this is what you want to do. This is how we're going to do it. This is also a goal. This is how we're going to do it. And the why behind everything also. So we spend a lot of time talking about subscription for example, and why is that important? Because we know that subscriptions drive recurring revenue for our farms. We know that, and I know we'll talk about this later in the call too, but email marketing is super important. So we'll go through why that is and who we use and how we're going to be setting it up and just making sure that we're connecting all of the different puzzle pieces for each farmer.
00:05:49
Speaker
Yeah, there are definitely some themes that come through. Tell folks, like if you're staring at the deck right now as well, tell folks like what the first you know five to 10 minutes looks and feels like. Clearly, you're going to introduce yourself and ask the firm what are their goals and different things like that. So you know how to gear the conversation and the store set up and even the recommendations custom
Efficient Store Setup
00:06:09
Speaker
to them. So making sure that we're always on the same page as the farmer here, the first thing that we'll roll through is what onboarding is all about. And what onboarding is all about really is getting your store set up so that you can start taking orders.
00:06:25
Speaker
Sometimes as quickly as the first meeting or the second meeting, depending on what we call but what homework is done, making sure that the farmer will know that they're going to be totally comfortable with the platform by the time they leave onboarding. I like to tell people that onboarding is really about... software, systems, settings, making sure that we have everything exactly how it needs to be set up for each individual farm. And then I take them through the resources that are available, which surprises a lot of people. We've got a lot of unique resources, the first of which that I love is Office Hours, which live help that we offer Monday through Friday.
00:07:02
Speaker
twice a day. So two times a day outside of these onboarding meetings when farmers are working on their homework or if they just have a question about whatever, and even farms outside of onboarding, they have two times a day that they can get into a meeting and talk with somebody live from the success team, which is really unique and very helpful for new farmers. I think office hours is one of my actually most favorite things. that we offer to farmers because it's humans helping humans, right? It's like, no, you can literally any day of the week, Monday to Friday, pop into one of the office hours and be with a real human team member from burnt door to help to answer questions. And we've had that now, I want to say for close to two years, but it's just something we keep promoting so that all of our farms know, Hey, yes. Anytime I get to talk to a human who knows about farming, who can go into my account,
00:07:51
Speaker
who knows data from working with thousands of farms all across the country in every state. Like we have the information to help them be successful, which is unique, right? We're not just generic e-commerce.
00:08:03
Speaker
We literally know their business and we make ourselves available. I just, it's a passionate place for me to to be useful and helpful to farmers on a daily basis. And even our support team, if a farmer chats in or submits a support ticket, if they need to get in front of somebody, they can join like that same day. If it's like a more complicated, oh, I need to update my inventory. I can't remember how, can you show me how? Then they can pop into that office hour. So to your point, really powerful. And not just for onboarding, not just for folks that are in the first two months learning initially how to use this system. I love that because you might have a farm who's been a barn to door for you know two or three years already, but then they're like, oh, wait a minute, I'm going to start using a POS or I want to start offering subscriptions.
00:08:45
Speaker
How do I do that again? And then they can just go right into office hours and be trained and get help set up and they're off to the races. Exactly. I just got out of an office hours actually, and neither of the two farms in there were in orientation. They were existing farms, had been with us for years, just trying to do new things, which is really cool.
00:09:02
Speaker
I love that. It's great to have the examples.
Support Resources: Office Hours and Learn Center
00:09:05
Speaker
Appreciate that. The other resource that's really cool and totally different than office hours is the Learn Center. And that is basically an online encyclopedia where there are hundreds and hundreds of articles that our support teams and other different teams have put together how to do just about anything that you can think of within barn to door. So I always tell my folks, if you do better with written direction, or if you like to work on things at three o'clock in the morning, which a lot of farmers are, or very late at night when everything is done for the day, just leave that open in another tab. That should be your go-to. There is very little that you can't figure out with the help of the Learn Center, if anything at all. There are screenshots, videos. It's just, it's such a good tool. Actually, that just reminded me because isn't there a dropdown right inside like I'm sure you show farmers is probably even on day one when you're talking about these things, there's a dropdown help center right in their account. And what are their options? They're literally a click away.
00:10:02
Speaker
Exactly. So it is a link to book into office hours. It is a link to take you directly into the Learn Center. And then it's a link to contact our support team. And our support team, like you said, has crazy fast response times. They always get back to you pretty much immediately. So there's always somebody, some way to get help. That's really awesome. Thank you for sharing that.
00:10:23
Speaker
And then what is the timeline? I think we have sort of a standard timeline, but then it changes depending on the farmer's needs. Exactly. So pretty standard is to be in onboarding between one to two months. It depends on the size of the farm, the information we're moving over, a lot of different factors, but you know somewhere in between one to two months. And again, during that time, it is getting the store set up, teaching the farmer how to do everything, make sure that they're really set up for success. And then once we are done with onboarding, we, what we call graduate the farmer into account management where they meet with their account manager then for more long-term support. So that's where they leave the setup process and go into, okay, what is our brand going to look like? What's our website going to look like? Who are our target customers and how do we reach those customers? Just kind of realigning on your goals and again, figuring out what the best way is to hit all of those. It's like getting started is truly all the setup and comfort with the system. And then you start, I mean, when you're a farmer, you're farming, but you're also running a business, right? And so it's really getting used to running the business with your new tools, but then also to reach your goals in a meaningful way. And to keep informed on all the new things and features and capabilities coming out of barn to door, right? I think we introduced point of sale for in-person transactions three and a half, four years ago, And so anybody who signed it before that, it's like they need to learn about it, right? So it's a chance to do all that. And same thing, delivery as a service. That's just been in the water. We work delivery partners across the country now to offer farms that as an option. a lot of farms do their own delivery, but if they want to start doing delivery or they want to not be the delivery person and have somebody do it for them or deliver their items to their customers, we can get that sorted. But that takes, you know, a handful of calls and getting it set up and helping them with marketing. And that's to their own customers, of course. And that's where those account managers are a great point of contact, office hours and account managers. What if I am a farm and I literally show up and I'm like, it's Monday and on Saturday I have a farmer's market and I want things set up so I can
Quick Setup Checklist for Immediate Sales
00:12:29
Speaker
start selling. What happens then, Brianna? That's like fast. How do I fast track?
00:12:34
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And that is not abnormal. I've heard that a handful of times. So the game plan there ah is one resource I didn't mention before is the onboarding checklist. This will list out very clearly steps that a farmer needs to do in order to start going live and selling. that There's a couple of key things that need to happen. But for that farmer, we're using that first meeting to get as much of that done as possible. And I'm scheduling you into as many office hours as possible to Again, and it's really just a couple of key things that need to be done in order to start selling. We've had farms go live super fast. I love that. And then what if I'm a farm who I sell quarter half holes? We often work with a lot of farms who bring their cows to the sale barn.
00:13:18
Speaker
But they want the optionality to also have a sales channel where they're selling direct because they can make so much more per head and also set their own pricing, especially if the sale burn might not be in a good spot.
00:13:30
Speaker
So it gives them that flexibility to maintain profit in a year when they might especially want to be increasing their profits. So in that case, say I'm doing quarter half holes, but my butcher dates aren't until the fall. And let's say that's six months out. Then what, what does that look like?
00:13:46
Speaker
So that looks a little bit different because in that instance, we've got a bonus six months to start taking pre-orders and reaching new customers and really building the brand out. So we still, we get the store up and running as soon as we can. we get you to a place where you can start taking pre-orders and securing those processing dates and get you moved through to your account manager where you can really start focusing on the branding side of things and reaching more customers. But nonetheless, the store still gets set up super fast to start taking pre-orders. I love that you said that because...
00:14:19
Speaker
Pre-orders, I think in some cases is maybe a new concept. I feel like a lot of the farms that come to us, it's like the butcher date feels like it's tomorrow and I i don't know who's going to buy you know the quarter half whole or some people said they wanted to and then I can't get a hold of them. So what does it look like? How are you helping those farmers secure pre-orders? What is that experience so that when the butcher date does roll around, everything's already sold? So typically what we do with operations like that is we figure out what the processing schedule is, right? Are you processing every month? Are you processing quarterly? And we get what we call sort of fulfillment schedules built out accordingly so that customers know, okay, I can place an order for September, October, or November, for example. At that point, When you have people available, you're actually taking a deposit from them to secure that processing date. So for example, the deposit for a whole beef might be $1,000, a half might be $500, et cetera, but that gets the customer to commit. And that is peace of mind for the farmer too, right? Knowing, okay, if I'm sending this whole beef to the processor. i know that I have a customer for it. And in the instance they do back out for whatever reason, I've got processing fees covered and I still have my thousand dollars for that animal.
00:15:37
Speaker
That's amazing. I love that you can line it up to September, or October, November, and I'm assuming then you're, you know, those farmers have not just the peace of mind, but they actually know exactly what they've sold for each of those particular butcher dates. So if they need to change it from five to seven or eight cows or whatever else they know going in. That's amazing.
00:15:55
Speaker
Very cool. Okay. So we've kind of covered getting comfortable, getting set up. do we talk a little bit about what is store set up? Like getting their store set up is a big one, right? Because You have to have your online store in place. You got to connect the dots with your bank so that it's just automatic. You're automatically paid out and then inventory set up. That's what you're doing on the back end. So what is that? Just the store set up experience. What's sort of that general best practices as you're helping farmers get set up? And I know that It's different if I'm selling chickens versus flowers, but maybe you can speak to them. Yeah, there's a few hard, fast rules that are going to apply to any farmer. The first that we know is our most successful farms have less than 50 items in their storefront. And this all ties back to what's going to make it easiest for the customer, ultimately the farmer too. But if you have a storefront that's full of 180 items and you're only selling two or three different proteins, that's a lot of decisions for the customers to make. And ultimately, every time I click that next page button, conversion is dropping down. A great way to keep your store under 50 items is creating bundle boxes, which we talk a lot about.
00:17:06
Speaker
Bundle boxes are essentially bundles of products, right, that people would already be buying together. So for example, a beef bundle box might be a few pounds of ground beef, a couple of steaks,
Strategies for Store Efficiency
00:17:17
Speaker
and a roast. A chicken bundle box might be a whole bird, a couple of different pieces, so on and so forth. So that is really the biggest thing with store setup is keeping it as concise as possible. We also know that about 60% of sales will come from your top five pinned items. So making sure that your best sellers are at the top of your stores and that your assortment is really curated to what your customers want to see.
00:17:43
Speaker
Love it. I appreciate that. So you get their bank connected and you start adding items to the store. And then that's where the best practices are, right? You're saying, Hey people, if you have 400 items, they will never scroll to the end, right? Like you want to make sure your best sellers are at the top that you can consolidate where possible. And of course we have all this data because we watched the numbers behind scenes.
00:18:03
Speaker
We're like, wow, if farmer does this, they have better outcomes, right? They have more sales. And so we're going to pass that knowledge on during the setup process. Explain a little bit about um schedules and fulfillments, because this is a really neat part of the store that I love because as an online shopper, which I think the majority of people can say about themselves, I'm an online shopper. You know, that many people literally, this is how people shop today and they want that option. And it does ensure sales, especially people that find your website. You need that store right in front of them. But the unique part of what we've built at Barnsdorf for Farmers is when their customers go to do their self-serve shopping so they can drop things in a cart, make the payment and it's done. Like that's going right into the farmer's bank. What's unique about the I'm choosing how I'm going to get that food?
00:18:49
Speaker
Yeah, so from the customer standpoint, it's what's expected, right? As a shopper, I need to be able to log in, place an order and figure out exactly when and where I'm going to get it, which is part of what we set up with the farmer. What's unique about barn to door and e-commerce specifically for farms is that you can have different inventory items available in different ways. So for example, not everything might be available at the farmer's market location, but it is available at the on-farm store or whatever variety of ways people are getting product from you. So being able to customize by inventory item, how people are getting product from you is huge and cuts back on all of that communication between the farmer and the customer. We know that before barn to door, it takes on average like seven touches for somebody to complete an order. with a farm. You can't see what they have for sale, how much it costs and how I'm going to get it Now all of a sudden you're emailing, texting, Facebook message back and forth with a farm. And this is where like, if you're a farm and it's seven touches on average, if you don't have a system in place and you have 400 customers, do the math. How many hours a week now are you quote unquote managing orders and the order process and payments like hours every week, because you don't have a system in place where I can go see all the information, You know, throw in my credit card, complete the purchase, choose my pickup or delivery location on whatever day you've provided and check out. And the buyer doesn't have to talk to anybody in the farmers provided all that information in one useful place. So the time savings alone is just huge for farmers who don't have a system in place.
00:20:30
Speaker
And this is when you can really start run your business efficiently and potentially then have the opportunity to grow. So really. really powerful. Actually, it reminds me, we just wrote the grassroots marketing ebook that's coming out, I think it's next month, but we talk a lot about no friction for the buyers, right? If the buyers have to call, text, or Facebook message you, well, you might have some that are willing to do that. The majority of people will not bother because it's friction versus like, no, I can complete the purchase just in one sitting in less than a few seconds.
00:20:59
Speaker
Exactly. And let alone going to meet a stranger, like in a parking lot with a wad of cash. There's a lot of people that just won't do that. Yeah, I appreciate that. So we're talking through setting up online, right, with inventory and schedules, making it easy then for for the buyers to buy. And of course, they have options on payments too. What does that look like?
00:21:17
Speaker
Exactly. So like every other online order you've ever placed, right, your buyers can check out with a card, which is preferred by like 97 point something percent of buyers at this point. I'd be surprised if it wasn't higher. If there are loyal customers that you trust or that are a little more old school and want to pay with cash or check, we can certainly set that up also. And also ACH for bigger purchases like bulk beef and things like that. So all of that will be covered within Barn to Door.
00:21:47
Speaker
This is the other thing we love is like we think about farmers having more controls and optionality in their business as they're becoming more efficient. And so in the case of payments, they can literally choose, you know, if they want to offer check or cash for particular people versus not others. If they want to only have credit card, if they want ACH, yes or no, um um and even by wholesale versus retail.
00:22:10
Speaker
Exactly. Tons of different levers you can pull. You can actually have up to three different pricing lists. So you can do your public retail list, which is for your everyday customers. Like you said, you can have wholesale, which often has lower pricing or even different unit sizes that people are buying in. And then you can also have just like a private storefront, which some people will use for family and friends. Some farmers will use that as a dedicated storefront for just their subscribers. For example, I know a lot of our fans, we've got some pork producers that will make their bacon only available in the private storefront to people that are subscribed to their bundle boxes. So there's a lot of really cool things you can do and different levers you can pull to customize it.
00:22:53
Speaker
I love it. No wonder that makes a ton of sense then for onboarding to walk through that initial setup, essentially for success, right? But say a little more about that, because if I'm a farmer and I'm coming in, you're saying I can have anybody who buys a CSA box or a meat bundle box, a monthly subscription that will then basically unlock their access to the goodies.
00:23:14
Speaker
Exactly. So we'll talk a lot in onboarding about add-ons, right? And driving up your average order size as much as possible. Add-ons are a great way to do that. So when somebody is buying a weekly produce box or a monthly meat box, once they make that purchase, like you said, they'll unlock a private store where, for example, there could be all of these other add-ons. eggs, dairy, microgreens, honey, flour subscription. I've seen tons of different options there. That helps your customers feel special, like they have access to something that people don't have and they are special and they should. It also kind of drives a sense of FOMO, which we talk about a lot, and it makes other people want what these special group of people are getting.
00:23:58
Speaker
Yeah, I appreciate that. It's neat for them to be able to just automatically reward their loyal customers and not have to go do that manually. It just will unlock that store for those folks. That's really neat. And so what happens if I am selling eggs to both retail and wholesale? How do you handle that?
00:24:15
Speaker
Yeah, so we set the inventory item up on two different pricing sheets, which is very easy to do. Retail will get assigned one set of pricing. Wholesale will get assigned a separate set of pricing. And you'll be able to identify who your wholesale buyers are so you don't run the risk of any crossover there, right? Some farmers don't want their retail customers to see their wholesale pricing. And in this instance, they won't.
00:24:41
Speaker
I love that. Again, farmer controls. That's a really important piece. I love putting them in the driver's seat. I always want to be cheeky and say we put them in the tractor seat. So now I can basically do what I need to do to service both consumer, wholesale, give special pricey, either to friends and family or to my most loyal customers in that private section of my store. That's really nifty. And then I've set up do I offer pickup or do I offer delivery? and But what do you do in an instance where you have what consumer pickup locations potentially, and I can also offer delivery just to wholesale?
00:25:15
Speaker
Also easy to set up again, because we're built specifically for farmers. There's all of these different unique combinations you can have with your fulfillment. So we call them schedules, but It's essentially just unique ways that customers are shopping from you. You can get very granular with locations, dates, times, and again, link each individual item if necessary back to one specific way that somebody can get it from you. So I've been with farms where we've set up 15 different schedules, 20 different schedules, and some farms that just will have one or two and everything in between.
00:25:51
Speaker
I think it's just partly what is the business of the farmer, right? That's what sort of enlists you to set things up in a particular way. However, it's also, hey, these are the best practices, so let's make sure it's as easy as possible for both your buyer and for the farmer to be happy with how easy it is to shop if I'm a buyer, and then how easy it is to obviously manage my recurring deliveries or product, et cetera, as a farmer. You're basically trying to make it as easy as possible for both.
00:26:21
Speaker
Exactly. And again, we have a ton of data behind that too. So we know 80% of buyers will drive up to five miles for local pickup. So we talk a lot about the local loop and establishing drop locations where your customers already are. So whether that is a parking lot of a big store in town, whether that is church, whether that's
Boosting Sales with Delivery Options
00:26:43
Speaker
a book club that meets during the week, figuring out who your customers are and making sure that you can meet them there is a big part of that. So we'll help farmers brainstorm and think of ideas that might fit in to their life there. And also when farmers are open to doing delivery, we'll always explore that more with them too, because we know that farms that offer delivery can see as much as twice in volume than farms that don't. So if there is even one day a month that the farmer might want to do delivery, great. We're pulling up a map. We're looking at zip codes. We're looking at populations around them. You don't need to be in a huge metro area, right? Towns with 20,000 people that are close by is plenty for most farms to sell out.
00:27:28
Speaker
That's a great call out. I always go back to, what if I'm worried that the chef was trying to order at 11 PM and deliveries the next day? Or we have some farms that do consumer pickups throughout a whole weekend. How do I deal with that?
00:27:42
Speaker
ah We do what we call order cutoffs, right? So an order by date to make sure, again, that you're not getting an order at midnight for something that needs to be filled at six o'clock in the morning. All of that is customizable that we'll walk through as we're setting something up. And again, all of that can be applied back to individual inventory items too. So we'll often have things that you keep in stock regularly. You might be able to allow customers to order the day before for pickup the next day, but for things that are either grown to order or not available yet, those you can specify different lead times for. Yeah, that is really neat. When you're on Amazon, if you show up, it's it's available, right? That sort of a thing. Versus you might start selling turkeys in June, but...
00:28:23
Speaker
the delivery date is clearly going to be all the way out near Thanksgiving, which is pretty neat. Okay. Let's talk through, there's one more, I'm kind of thinking through their account as you're giving people a tour of here's the different systems to be thinking about. And we've talked about setup and inventory and order management and making sure they have the various fulfillments in place.
00:28:44
Speaker
Two other things we haven't chatted about in terms of just general setup. And then there's more to go into one is POS. And then the other one is just customer management. So choose which one you want to talk about next.
00:28:55
Speaker
I'll start with point of sale. Our point of sale device is great. It's really think of it as just another piece of the puzzle for all of these great business tools that you're getting. For our farms that are doing official in-person sales, like farmers markets, they're amazing because it is a fast way for your customers to check out when you're face-to-face. It will record the sale and deduct from inventory. So whether you're selling online or in person, your inventory is being kept up to date. And it's going to collect customer information for you that syncs back to your barn to door account, which is huge. We know this. um It will help grow your email list. Growing your email list grows your sales. Even for our farms that aren't doing official in-person sales, like festivals or farmers markets, it is a great tool to have. It's just a way to ensure that you are never missing another sale ever again. i know all of our farmers are running their kids around to, you know, cheer, baseball, whatever it is. You're with your community all the time and people are asking for products all the time. Having the point of sale in your purse, in your truck. When someone says, hey, do you have any meat birds? You can say yes, take the sale and bring it for them next week. Love it. Yes. Take a sale anytime, anywhere. That's a great way to keep making money. I love it. And then customers, obviously in order to sell, you need to have customers.
00:30:16
Speaker
Exactly. So one of the first things that will encourage a farm to do, we've talked about emailing a little bit. Once our farms create their MailChimp account, that's who we use for our email marketing. We'll create them a email signup form.
00:30:30
Speaker
which is just a way to continue to collect emails from farmers outside of the point of sale device.
Enhancing Sales with Email Marketing
00:30:35
Speaker
And we'll encourage our farms to share that with their friends and family, to share it on their Facebook page. Even if you don't have the even have a business page for the farm yet, share it on your personal page. The more people's emails that you have, the more that you're able to communicate out with people, the more sales you will see. The newsletters are really powerful. It's something that you work on more with your account manager. But growing that email list out is one of the first steps in doing that. Yeah, we've done some analysis on essentially the number of emails a farmer has literally will equal how much money they make in a given year, which is incredibly powerful. So email collection is just essentially customer collection, right, which is so critical. When farmers are first getting set up, we I think you show them how to add emails, you can add them manually, but then they'll also be added automatically. Can you speak to that a little bit?
00:31:26
Speaker
Yes. So any farm coming in that has an existing customer list, it's very easy to import directly into Barn to Door. There's a farm that we have that it takes just a couple seconds to do it. So making sure that there's no gaps between your customers today and your customers tomorrow will always be our priority. So we'll get those moved over for you. And then again, as for new customers, as they're placing orders and as you're collecting them, they'll automatically be saved in your account to continue to build your list out.
00:31:59
Speaker
Yeah, that's awesome. And we even have it set up where most customers will create an account with a saved credit card. Some people really love to shop as a guest. So that is something that we offer at Burn2Door to make sure that a farmer is not missing out on any sales. People can literally be a guest shopper, make a purchase, but we just actually debuted the ability for those guests even to opt into marketing from you as a farmer. So even if they don't create an account, you actually get to send marketing emails to them, which is just cool and crazy. So that's really important, but then yeah, manually adding emails as you collect them. And then automatically we make sure that farmers are capturing emails as they're making purchases, whether that's on their POS in person at the market, they're able to submit their email or online, whether they're making purchases, et cetera. I'm just going to call this out. We have a integration with MailChimp, which is a lovely tool. Your farm can brand really beautiful newsletters because you want to look really professional. And then because it's a full integration, farmers can then readily, like literally while you're putting your newsletter together, you can be grabbing items right from your store to insert into your newsletter. So it's very custom, beautiful branding experience for farmers that it's directly integrated. Now we have a few farms, like most farms will use that service, but you can still send emails if I don't have MailChimp, correct?
00:33:18
Speaker
Exactly. You can still send order reminders just through barn to door. And that's something that will get set up if you're bringing existing customers over. You won't leave onboarding without having us set this up for you. But the weekly order reminders, again, super powerful, just staying top of mind with all of your customers. Our farms that have order reminders set up, we know do about 30% more in volume than our farms that don't. So yeah. An email will go out to your customers at the same time every week. You just set it up one time and say, hey, don't forget to get your orders in on Thursday for pickup on Saturday or whatever it might be. And people do it. People are shopping from their emails.
00:33:58
Speaker
Yeah, it can be a lifesaver. We've had farmers say, you know, when it gets really busy, knowing that my people are still getting reminded to place their orders that week is literally a godsend because things do get busy. And what if you don't have time for that, you know, monthly or twice a month newsletter, you can sleep better at night knowing that they're getting those reminders to place those orders. Because that's a big deal, right? Marketing for the sake of sales. What I love about that is it's set it and forget it, right? You set it up one time and now you have a marketing engine essentially in place, right? You've got basic marketing going. It's just powered by Barnes Adore and the farmer's behalf. Can you explain why we hook it up even to make sure that the email it comes from is branded? It's really interesting. and People kind of miss that detail.
00:34:40
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So the email will come from the farmer's website, essentially, even if the farmer doesn't have a hosted email, it's great for brand consistency. And we know that that is ultimately what helps build trust with customers. And when customers trust the brand that they're shopping from, they end up spending more money with that brand. So being able to send the automated reminders from an email that looks super professional, just ups the ante even more for the farmer.
00:35:09
Speaker
Even though Barns and Doors powering the email sends, we actually brand the email to the farmer's farm or brand, which is really neat, right? Same thing. Again, we're just trying to be under the hood powering farmer success, but powering their brand because it's about that. It's about their customers. It's about their brand. It's all the way through it, right? It's about their
Driving Growth: Financial and Professional
00:35:27
Speaker
profits. We just, again, we want to give them controls. Awesome. Okay. I think we've covered some pretty good basics on setup and what that entails and why it's important. Let's dig in a little bit then to, we have sort of three tenets at Barn to Door that we emphasize. And one is make more money. Like we're here to help farmers make more money. So we go dig in on that. The second one is to ditch the office work. We sometimes say ditch the boring office work. um And we want to make sure that farmers are getting processes in place to literally save hours and hours of time every single week. And so like Breonna, as the onboarding manager, will take the farmer through all the ways that they can potentially
00:36:05
Speaker
set up systems to not be doing sort of the same thing on repeat and can actually automate things. And then the third is look like a pro. And that just has to do with the professionalism that builds trust with buyers, because we know if a farmer develops loyal buyers, they're going to make more money. Right? So it's this beautiful circle of like, Hey, this is like, take your business up a notch, be really good at business. for your farm so you can be farming successfully. So let's talk a little bit about make more money. Like what is top of mind for you when you're talking to a farm? And if it's helpful for you to be like, I'm going to pretend I'm talking to a dairy.
00:36:40
Speaker
Sure. The first thing that I think of when a farm comes in and the goal is to make more money is really making it as easy as possible for people to shop. That's often the gap there, right? Because we know farmers have... good products, we know that they have products available. Oftentimes the barrier to entry is just being available in the way that they need to. So that ties back again to the store setup. So making sure that you have options for the customers that you're looking to serve and that you have an easy way for them to order from you, where I'm able to, in the one minute that I have available in my data place and order, that I can figure out who you are, what you have, and I can check out with an easy way to
Milk Subscriptions for Consistent Sales
00:37:26
Speaker
get the product. That in a nutshell is what we'll try to convey to the farmer when it comes to making more money.
00:37:32
Speaker
So removing buyer friction. So if I'm a dairy coming to you, for example, like what would you recommend how I set up my store to optimize for sales? And then is there anything that you think of like removing friction from the buyers to make it super simple if I'm a dairy? What could some of those items be?
00:37:49
Speaker
Yeah, for a dairy in particular, subscriptions are going to be the number one driver. This is milk that we're talking about. I know exactly how much milk me and my husband drink every week. People with kids, forget it.
00:38:03
Speaker
Gallons a week in some instances, making it easy for people to just say, hey, you were my farmer. I love your product. I want to be locked in as a consumer. I want to know that I'm getting my milk from you every week. And then on the farmer side, you know that you're selling X amount of product each week on a subscription is a win-win. So with a dairy farm, the first thing we're looking at is setting up weekly subscriptions for a gallon, two gallons, three gallons, whatever it needs to be. And then talk a little bit about that. Cause you actually are like, Hey, there's a couple. And then there's a big family. How does that information Brianna help you help the farmer make more money?
00:38:39
Speaker
yeah So because of all the different farms we work with and the different customers they serve, we know a third of Americans live alone. a third are households with couples or like two to three people and the balances are families four or more. So making sure that all of our farmers have something to fit into each of those households is going to be key.
00:39:00
Speaker
So a gallon of milk is probably perfect for a couple. Families that have multiple children that are all drinking milk at the same time, they might need four or five gallons a week, depending on the size of their family. So making sure that you have a small, a medium and a large subscription across no matter what type of product you have is always going to be our recommendation.
00:39:23
Speaker
i love that because now you're reaching all sizes of families as potential customers. Because if you only have a subscription for four gallons of milk, now all of a sudden anybody who's a single or a couple aren't going to be able to buy that subscription, right? And so you miss out on customers. You literally miss out on sales if you shrink who can buy from you, right? So it's the balance of enough options, but not so many that there's fatigue, that buyer's fatigue is real. And so when you're talking to an onboarding manager Barntador, they know this and can help direct your firms to maximize
00:39:56
Speaker
the opportunity for the variety of customers that you might serve in your area, including retail or wholesale and different size, different types of customers. And then with it in mind, not to have, you know, 400 items in your store, but to consolidate in the most meaningful way to optimize for sales, which is just kind of cool.
00:40:16
Speaker
so figure You're like, my goal for you farmer is to make sure that you are maximizing your opportunity to make money. to make profit, to reach as many customers as possible where you are. And that's just, you know, it's what we do. It's why you're on the phone as eight to 12 farmers every day, right? To do exactly that, help them make more money. I love it. Okay. Talk to me then a little bit about ditch the office work. What does that conversation look like? Maybe you could choose I don't know if you want to choose a beef farmer, maybe even like produce, right? How does a produce farmer, i have vegetables coming out my ears literally in the middle of the summer. How are you going to save me time? I don't want to be in the back office doing repeat tasks.
00:40:57
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. i think where I usually see produce farmers, their eyes light up more than any other time is when I walk them through our pick and pack list, especially for produce farmers where there are lots of different things available at any given time. It's not as simple as, you know, perhaps like a steak or ground beef. The pick and pack list is where we'll walk you through where you'll go to figure out all of your orders for the day, right? So you can look at your orders for an individual day or ah an individual fulfillment method, like delivery day, for example. So you'll go into your store's backend, you'll look at your orders and you'll be able to see exactly who who has placed an order for what, exactly where it needs to go. It'll spit out labels for you to print out. It'll spit out invoices. That too also ups the ante when it comes to branding and professionalism too. Like when I'm getting a delivery from the farm and it's coming or with an invoice that has a farm's logo on it and it's coming from a real delivery service, like that's pretty impressive. And then other ways that farms are saving time is automating all of the boring admin that they're doing now. So again, once a customer places an order, they are automatically going to get a receipt sent to them, the farmers notified it that they have an order. So we
00:42:19
Speaker
Farmer isn't having to do any of that back and forth with the customer. Everything is crystal clear from the time a customer places the order. And inventory is deducted in real time, which I know I mentioned earlier, but it's important because farmers aren't having to run around and take inventory after they're done with a market or after they're done with a weekend of sales at the farm store. And then additionally, we've talked a lot about bundle boxes and the sort of next step to that is subscriptions, which end up saving farmers a ton of time too, whether it's a dairy or whether it's a protein farmer. Getting people on subscriptions is easy for the customer because I can set it and forget it. And it can drive up to 80% recurring revenue month over month, which is huge and leaves the farmer in a place where they're not having to chase orders every month. Yeah, chase orders or checks, right? Like who wants to be tracking down customers for payment? Like that's just not a good experience for either party. So the payments already occurred. You're paid even before you're delivering, which is huge, right? And I loved your like, don't have to go count after the market. It's already been in real time. My inventory is going to be accurate on the back end, which is just really, those are fun, save time things because who wants to go around doing that? Like take away the gross chores.
00:43:34
Speaker
Exactly. And it gives you more time to spend with the customers in a lot of instances or with your own family. So it's it's meaningful time that people are getting back into their day. Yeah, I appreciate that. And then what about, um you know, all farms come to us saying, hey, I want help of marketing because you have to do that in order to accomplish sales, right? You have to have customers, you have to do some sort of marketing, which is either focused on and it should be both focused on new buyers or focused on existing buyers because new buyers you always want to be growing your email list because there's going to be natural attrition but you also need to focus on existing buyers with regular kind of engagement touches to make sure that they're loyal to you remember you and are ordering from you regularly so how how can you help me Brianna So order reminders is a great way to do that. Again, we'll get these set up. You just have to set it up one time for these to go out to your customers every single week forever. The other really cool thing that we offer is the marketing toolkit. This is a marketing add-on that we offer our farms and it is perfect.
00:44:38
Speaker
pre-made content. It is graphics that the same designers that build all of our websites create specific for each month for all different farms that we're working with. And it is the most turnkey solution to have a very up-to-date, effortless social media. We've got an office hours also that's dedicated to how to use the marketing toolkit. So scheduling posts out, figuring out what captions are the best. There's a whole team here really to help get all of that set up. So it's just flowing automatically for you.
00:45:08
Speaker
Awesome. I love it. Yeah. Automated emails. Amazing. We also help with automated email collection, which is really neat. Whether you're people shopping online or in person, we make sure that you're collecting emails through your Facebook, through your newsletters, et cetera. So, um, and then let's talk a little bit about look like a pro. That's sort of the third thing that we focus on. And why does that matter? What does that look like? And why does it matter?
00:45:29
Speaker
Yeah, so when we say look like a pro, really what we mean is making sure that your brand is reflective of the quality of the product that you have and that it's consistent across all of the different platforms where customers are potentially encountering your brand. because that's really the expectation, right?
00:45:49
Speaker
Anybody that we're shopping from, whether we're seeing them on social media, whether we're seeing them in person, again, it ties back to building trust with your customers. And they need that consistency in order to feel like you're a brand that they want to be shopping from. So really, some of the earliest pieces where I'll see this on the branding side is well once your farms start To post a little bit more, you can see some really early results for posting on Facebook because one of the big things is just, okay, I see you on Facebook, but now what? And when you have barn to door, when a farm is posting something on Facebook, they're posting it with a link that's taking their customer directly back into their store to actually make the purchase. So yes, looking like you're a really professional polished brand is one thing, but also giving customers the same really polished experience that every other brand you're doing. them is key.
00:46:41
Speaker
Yeah.
Consistent Brand Experience
00:46:42
Speaker
And a lot of people think brand is just a visual thing and it's really not. It's actually a customer experience, right? Like, are you yelling me beautiful newsletters? Is it easy to buy from you? What is my shopping experience? What's my fulfillment experience? We all know once they taste the food, they're going to just be gold, right? But then you do need to keep reaching out and engaging those customers, right? To keep them. And that's where automated order reminders can be great, various things like that. So yeah, it's it's buyer expectations and experience are a really key part of looking like a pro. And ensuring sales. Let's just say that. So three more quick little things before we wrap. And then I want to give you a chance if there's anything top of mind that we've missed.
00:47:19
Speaker
But one is a trial run. Two is their store URL. And then three, we'll wrap with a store audit. But talk to me a little bit, like what is a trial run and why do you do it?
00:47:29
Speaker
Yeah. So a trial run, we also call that soft launch in some instances. We want you to get the store in front of trusted buyers, friends, family, people that are going to be able to give you real feedback, right? Because this is your store. There's a lot of hard work and details that have gone into building it. We want to make sure before you're blasting it out to the world and sending it to your email list that it's exactly how you want it to be set up. So we'll share our screens in these meetings that we have throughout onboarding and we'll comb through everything, but getting it in the hands of real people that are actually going to be using it is oftentimes the best feedback that you're going to get. Product availability, unit sizes. Did you have what they were looking for? All of those little things you want feedback on on the front end while we can still make tweaks very easily. That's a great point. You know what? Anything worthwhile takes effort and it also takes adjustment, right? You have to evolve, which is really important to be your best. And then the second one is a URL. Yes. So before the website is up and running, if it's a farm that is coming to us without an existing website, the e-commerce is live pretty much as soon as we start getting inventory items added. And you have this store URL that you can start sharing out with your friends, with your family, with your customers on social media. There is an existing storefront. So making sure that our farmers know exactly where to find the store URL, that they know how to text it, how to email it, how to DM it out to people. This storefront exists and it's where all of your current customers should be shopping because these are for the people who already know you, they already love you and they want your product. It's ultimately just making it easier for them to get it from you.
00:49:11
Speaker
I love that. it It makes me so happy when we get quotes back from farmers that are like, wow, all these people started just poking me text, Facebook message, email, like asking about what I had. And I just, instead of really saying anything, it's just like, here's the store link, go check out all the information you need.
00:49:27
Speaker
you know, to place an order. And a lot of farms will be like, I collect emails to then send people to there because then they have the habit of knowing exactly where, like bookmark the store, go order anytime you want from my farm. It's a very powerful tool. And then just to wrap up, I wanted to talk about a store audit because There's a lot that we talked about today in terms of setting up and be successful. And that's why the beauty of office hours is you can keep coming back to learn again account managers if you want to touch base that way. There's just, there's ways for you to continue to learn and be successful. But there's also like, is my store set up for sales, right? If I was a farmer, I'd be like, I want to make sure it's always set up for the most sales. So what is a store audit?
What is a Store Audit?
00:50:06
Speaker
Yeah, a store audit is basically a barn to door team member combing through all of the aspects of your store, right? So we're looking at your inventory. Are things labeled correctly? Are things live? Are things as they should be, right? We're looking for any red flags. We're also looking to see how they're available to your customers. Are dates current? Is everything attached to to a fulfillment method. Basically, again, any barriers, right? Just making sure that there is no barrier between how things are set up and your customer actually ordering for you. Yeah, easy shopping, bundle boxes if you don't have them, you know, or maybe a bundle boxes are one-time purchase boxes, but you don't have a subscription. It's just these best practices that can be offered. What items are pinned to the top? What does your store banner say? And I think many farms get pretty good at looking at that themselves. But if they ever need help, we certainly provide that service. Brianna, any final bits of advice or anything we didn't touch on, or even just your favorite part of being an onboarding manager before we sign off
00:51:07
Speaker
and We talked about so much. I would just reiterate how much support there is available to our farms. No matter what size you are, what products you have, I will never stop being surprised at how unique each individual operation is. And it's what makes my job really fun and challenging. And it's just incredible. Everything that we get to do for our farmers. So certainly favorite part of my job. And there's always something new around the corner.
00:51:36
Speaker
I love that it's called the success department because your job is literally to help set farmers up for success. And then again and again and again, right? I love it. Well, thank you. I want to extend my thanks, Brianna, to you today for joining. it was so fun to walk through what it looks like on the other side once farm's signed up and how we do literally set them up for success. We are humbled at Barn to Door to support thousands of independent farmers across the country. We're delighted to offer services and tools, many of which you've heard about today, to make more money, ditch the office work, and look like a pro.
00:52:07
Speaker
If you're an independent farmer who is just getting started or transitioning to selling direct, or if you've been at it a while and want to simplify your business management, visit barntador.com backslash learn more. Thank you for tuning in today. We look forward to joining you next time on the Independent Farmer Podcast.
00:52:33
Speaker
Thank you for joining us on the Independent Farmer podcast. At Barn to Door, we are passionate about empowering independent farmers to build a thriving business. To all the farmers out there, thank you for all you do to grow amazing food, care for the soil, and serve your local communities. You are the backbone of our country.
00:52:50
Speaker
For free farm resources or to listen to prior podcasts, go to barntodore.com backslash resources. We hope you join us again and subscribe to the Independent Farmer podcast wherever you stream your podcasts. Until next time.