How We Help Clients

Marketing & Sales

We help clients achieve commercial excellence by enhancing their go-to-market strategy, optimizing pricing, and improving sales execution.

The agriculture industry is experiencing significant disruption driven by macroeconomic shifts, grower challenges, and competitive pressures. Feeding an estimated global population of nine billion people by 2050 will require the industry to grow significantly while managing resource constraints and navigating increasing price volatility.

We help clients tackle these challenges by identifying growth opportunities and achieving commercial excellence through enhanced go-to-market strategies, optimized pricing, and disciplined sales execution.

What We Do

Achieve commercial excellence
Helping agriculture clients identify sources of organic growth and achieve above-market returns.
Ensure consistent sales execution
Helping clients drive consistent sales execution with clear performance evaluation, effective incentive programs, and rigorous performance management.
Spot data-driven growth opportunities
Using macrotrends, micromarket insights, and data-driven customer segmentation to surface the most attractive growth pockets.
Improve pricing and margins
Optimizing margins with the right pricing strategy and architecture, backed by strong pricing execution and contract management.
Capture lifecycle sales opportunities
Pinpointing sales growth opportunities across the customer lifecycle, from customer acquisition and account management to upselling, cross-selling, value selling, and retention.
Reinvent the customer journey
Redesigning the end-to-end customer journey to deliver a streamlined and omnichannel experience.
Design go-to-market strategy
Setting the go-to-market architecture and omnichannel strategy, supported by efficient marketing, retailer selection and enablement, and sales coverage.
Upgrade sales talent and capabilities
Building sales talent and accelerating capability development to sustain commercial excellence.

Examples of our work

Maximizing growth opportunities
Identified $500 million in growth headroom for a US crop protection producer.
Optimizing pricing through advanced analytics
Improved profit margins by more than 350 basis points for a global ingredients player through pricing discipline and advanced analytics-enabled dynamic price recommendations.
Guiding market entry
Identified $80 million in revenue potential for a seed producer entering the Indian market.
Optimizing marketing and distribution
Developed a marketing and distribution plan for specialty products, resulting in a 30 percent increase in projected return on investment for a European input player.

Featured Experts

Daniel Aminetzah
Senior Partner
Global co-leader of McKinsey Business Building, driving venture creation and business building for corporates and private capital, with deep expertise in digital transformations and industry-shaping innovations
David Fiocco
Senior Partner
Advises global agricultural companies across developed and emerging markets, working across the value chain from field to fork, particularly focused on creating value through strategic planning, digital and advanced analytics innovation and commercial transformations.
Ryan Paulowsky
Senior Partner
Advises clients across industries on a broad range of marketing and sales projects, focusing on driving transformational change in commercial organizations
Kun Lueck
Partner
Brings marketing and sales expertise to agricultural, chemical, and oil-field services and equipment companies in North America and Europe, guiding clients on merger and acquisition issues
Ryan McCullough
Partner
Leads ACRE—McKinsey’s agriculture and environmental advanced analytics center—and is a thought leader in best practices for use of analytics in crop yield forecasting, climate risk, geospatial analytics, and smallholder farmer solutions

Featured Capabilities

Periscope by McKinsey
Periscope by McKinsey
The Periscope platform combines world-class intellectual property, prescriptive analytics and cloud-based tools with expert support and training to drive revenue growth now and into the future.
ACRE
ACRE
ACRE combines proprietary market outlooks, pricing data, and expert insights to help food companies, governments, investors, and agriculture players make better pricing, crop selection, and sales and marketing decisions.

Featured Insights

Article
How agility and AI could rewire agriculture trading
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Global forces and algorithmic price discovery are reshaping agriculture trading. Traders and processors with agile, analytics‑driven...
Excavators working on construction site at sunset
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Paving the way for off-highway-equipment customers
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Customer demand for off-highway equipment is changing. US construction and agriculture equipment OEMs and dealers need to adapt...
Futuristic microchip and digital data flowing. Merging technology and ecology
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From bytes to bushels: How gen AI can shape the future of agriculture
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Complementing analytical AI with generative AI can create new value on and off the acre. A number of exciting use cases show...

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